


Public Relations

by Cards_Slash



Category: Broadchurch, Masters of Sex
Genre: M/M, Rumors made them do it, Set in Broadchurch
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2020-11-15 08:27:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 69,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20863220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: The fact that Alec Hardy was not currently, had not ever, and did not want to date the American sex research did not seem very important at all to the town of Broadchurch.  They did what they had always done with a little bit of juicy gossip: they made a spectacle of it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the lovely edited version of the fic being written in little bits on my [tumblr](bewareofchris.tumblr.com). It was beta read by noire73 and rvnoir who are amazing and wonderful.

“You’re a doctor! You said you were a doctor, I heard you say it!”

And this was, in Bill Masters’ experienced opinion, exactly the reason you didn’t go around telling anyone your present profession. (Not that it was, by technicality, his present profession.) He hadn’t seen the man fall over, but he could see him now: as skinny as a wisp of smoke, wearing a rumpled suit, laid out in a heap of limbs on the floor. He was breathing and that was a good sign, but he was also very pale (that didn’t mean anything, the majority of people around him were very fair-skinned). 

“I’m an obstetrician,” he stressed. A lapsed one, a man who hadn’t attended a birth or offered medical advice to a woman in so many years that the only reason he could still find a vagina on the first try was how prevalent they were in his current research. (And he wasn’t the one finding them, he was observing others doing the exploring.) 

“That’s a doctor!”

Bill was politely ushered to the front and made a part of the unfortunate spectacle. There he was, a funny foreigner kneeling by the collapsed body of an unknown man. “Right,” he whispered to himself. Even if he hadn’t had any need to use it, there was still a full history of training and practice stuck in his skull. He started in on the basic vitals, and wished for a stethoscope. (It had to be the heart; it really had to be the heart.) “Did someone call 911?”

“Call what?”

“Emergency services,” Bill said instead, “paramedics? Ambulance?”

The whole crowd registered the words at the same time, and there was a brief moment of one person looking at another before finally someone dialed the number on their cell phone. 

“Sir,” Bill shouted at the man. He jostled him just a bit, and pressed his knuckles as hard as he could against the center of the man’s breastbone and ground them in. That prompted a spasm of response; the man pushed against his hand with weak intent. His eyes opened just a bit, and then closed again.

“Don’t tell them,” he wasted breath to say, and that seemed to be the extent of his energy.

Still. He was breathing. All Bill needed to do was  _ keep _ him breathing. He shooed the crowd back and rolled the man up onto his side and pushed his bony limbs into the recovery position. That got him another mumbled objection and he considered that just about as close to good news as he was going to get at the moment. “Does anyone know his name? Was there anyone travelling with him?”

That prompted a whole chorus of no’s. A few shakes of various heads. Bill patted the man’s pockets, found a badge in one, and figured it was just his luck that he happened to be there to assist a collapsed cop in a country he’d never visited before. (Bad news for him if the poor bastard didn’t make it.) The badge indicated the man was DI Alec Hardy.

“All right, Mr. Hardy, I’m Bill,” he said, “you’re going to be fine.”

He couldn’t be sure what with the sudden noise of the approaching paramedics, but it sounded a good deal like the man said “liar.”

–

It was becoming distressingly commonplace to wake up in hospital rooms. Hardy was a normal man, with normal inclinations, and like most normal people, he didn’t even like hospitals when he was well. But here he was, laid out in nothing but a paper-thin gown, hooked up to wires and tubes. He groaned as awareness started spreading from his drowsy head to his aching chest and down to the odd hotspots. He’d have bruises wherever he’d landed this time. (His hip seemed to think it had received the worst of it, but his elbow was throbbing in competition too.) 

“That’s an encouraging sound.” It wasn’t an unfamiliar voice, but it wasn’t a familiar one either. When Hardy managed to pry his eyes fully open he found himself looking at the attentive face of a stranger. An  _ American _ stranger who was pulling a pair of reading glasses off his face as he shifted in his chair. An American stranger with some kind of medical training, if his attention to the monitor over Hardy’s bed was any sort of indication. “I hope you don’t mind, I lied to them and said we were travelling together.”

“What?”

“I don’t know why,” the man assured him, “No, I do know why, I thought if I didn’t come with you, I’d never know how it turned out. It might have been on the news, I don’t know. I’m not from here.”

“Yeah,” Hardy mumbled. He pushed his hands against the hospital bed beneath him and lifted his shoulders up higher. Even that effort felt monumental. “I gathered that from the...” he motioned at the man’s whole face but he meant to say accent.

“Yes, I suppose that was redundant. Well,” the man said, “I should go. The doctors said they would be in to talk to you as soon as you were awake.”

“No need,” Hardy said. He grabbed the sheets and made an attempt to throw them off. His clothes would be somewhere nearby, wadded up and shoved into a bag. His suits could hardly get more wrinkled, and maybe that was part of his strategy to avoid any undue attention. “I’ve already heard it.”

“You stupid man,” the way the American said it was so honest that it could only be born of shock. “You  _ know _ . You  _ know _ and you’re just– you shouldn’t be travelling alone. You shouldn’t be travelling at all! You shouldn’t even be out of the hospital, you  _ know  _ _ that _ ?”

Hardy was gathering his energy to force his limbs into a standing position. The best he’d managed was a hunched-forward lean. “Thank you for the advice,” he said dryly. “You were leaving?”

The moment could have been resolved and forgotten, but who should stride through the open hospital door than Ellie goddamn Miller. She was full of bustling energy, and opening her mouth to voice concern that would be carried right back to the station. “Oh,” Interrupted her demanding answers to why he’d been delivered to a hospital, “Who’s this?”

There was a chance that the American was going to say something regrettable and stupid. His professional outrage was still as bright on his face as a halogen bulb. There he stood, shifting his stance one way and then the other, like he hadn’t quite worked out how to respond to being  _ dismissed _ . Hardy was willing to concede that his worries had a solid foundation in medical fact, but he’d already done as much with every other doctor he’d met. What he wasn’t prepared to do was allow this stranger to interrupt his life. The doctor had no more than started to open his mouth before Hardy cut him off.

“He’s my friend,” Hardy said. He was searching through his dusty memory to the sound of the name he’d heard before, something like, “Bill.”

“Bill?” Miller repeated.

“Bill Masters,” the man obediently clarified.

“ _ Bill _ ,” Miller said again, “he gets a first name then? What’s so special about him? I get  _ Miller _ , never Ellie, always  _ Miller _ and he gets  _ Bill _ .” She was thankfully distracted by this information and that saved the situation quite neatly.

“Don’t start,” Hardy snapped, “go and tell them I’m leaving.” He managed to get his legs over the side of the bed as he spoke. When he shifted his weight so that he was standing, his unsteady body was kind enough to hold him. “Go on. Bill was just leaving.”

Miller glared at him, but she turned to go, and Bill Masters was left staring at him from the other side of a hospital bed. He was quiet, severe, and only minimal involved when he said, “you need to tell them. You’re not always going to get lucky like you did today.”

Yes, well, he had work to do. The fact that he was dying didn’t change that. “You were just going,” he repeated.

The man made a scoffing noise, “and they say Americans are rude.”

\--

It had not been Bill’s idea to ‘vacation abroad’. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint where the idea had started, but he felt that the execution of the idea had most definitely been Betty’s doing. Being sent off to ‘sulk and get over it’ in some distant, random British town (village? shire? cliffside?) hadn’t been as insulting before he’d arrived. The town felt almost comically small, like the sort of isolated location that belonged in an outdated TV show. He had been pleasantly surprised to find that the town hadn’t turned black and white while he slept. 

He’d stood in front of the mirror the next morning, razor in hand, contemplating the effort it would take to make something presentable of the overgrowth of scruff on his face. It had grown too much to be called a shadow, and not yet enough to be considered a beard. There was a certain kind of freedom in leaving it as it was. He was here in exile; there was nobody to impress and no reason to worry about trying. 

When Bill finally left his hotel room he was greeted by the obnoxious, friendly hotel keeper. (What did one call the owner of a hotel?) She was pretty, and young-ish, and she smiled at him with far too much enthusiasm. “I hope you’re enjoying your stay, we haven’t had many tourists on account of the…" her hand motioned sideways without indicating anything really.

“It’s been fine, thank you.” By fine he meant that he had arrived late the night before and had wanted nothing but to sleep. Now he was now in need of something to eat and maybe a walk. Bill had never been one to spend too much time walking, but that was before he was exiled. 

Bill had no idea what he was like in exile. He hadn’t had much idea of what he was really like at all (apparently). Betty mentioned something along those lines (something like, ‘figure out what kind of man you are before you put us all out of a job’, or maybe ‘Virginia is gone, boss, we can’t lose you too’) before she handed him his luggage and his hat and pushed him out the front door of the business he owned. 

“Good,” she said, “good. And your name was Bill Masters?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t that she had asked, it was the  _ way _ she had asked. There were a variety of ways that people said his name. There were very few that repeated it with happy ignorance since he’d published his study results. Virginia was far better at the talk show circuit, but Bill had been paraded across every TV screen in America (and anywhere else that cared). His name had slowly become synonymous with snickering, blushing, and angry Christian types telling him he was going to hell. People said his name with curiosity and naughty interest. They said it with outright disgust. They said it like this woman said it, with a knowing nod, as if she were in on whatever secret she thought he had. “I’m sorry, and your name was?”

“Becca,” she said with a smile, “Fisher.” While she didn’t wink at him, exactly, that same knowing stayed firmly on her face and her smile was ever so slightly wicked. “Let me know if you need anything during your stay.”

–

It would have been a miracle, Hardy supposed, to think that Miller could have just– 

Well, he would have been happy if she’d just stopped talking. If she’d managed to discover anything about his life (albeit something he’d just made up because having a previously unknown American friend was better than admitting he was very near to dying) and just never mentioned it again. There was a murder to solve still; there was the ongoing debacle of the death of a boy, and rather than greeting him with any pertinent information, he walked into a cup of coffee (he didn’t drink) and Miller’s smug face.

“Have a nice time with  _ Bill _ , did we?”

There could not have been anything about his appearance or expression that indicated Hardy had a nice time with anyone, or even that he was  _ capable _ of having a nice time. But there was an implication in those words, and the smugness of her face as she looked at him that implied something deeply untrue about the situation. “Don’t start,” he said.

“Known  _ Bill _ for very long?”

“Miller,” he said.

“You know, it's interesting, I wouldn’t have figured you for the sort of man who had friends named  _ Bill _ . I don’t know that I figured you for the sort to have friends,” she was mumbling that last bit into her own cup.

“Yes, great, do you have any  _ actual _ information to report or have we solved the murder while I was away?”

Miller’s face disapproved of him, and his tone, and his tastelessness, but she, at the very  _ least,  _ stopped talking about Bill. God only knew what he’d be forced to come up with by way of explanation if she hadn’t. It wasn’t that Hardy had ever volunteered any information about his life, it was that she pried it out of him with her incessant needling. It was worse when she didn’t; whatever he didn’t say, she assumed. It was a maddening habit of hers, always filling in his blank spaces with the nearest logical conclusion. (And if she were right, and she very often was, he never confirmed it. He just left her thinking whatever she preferred to think. God knows what she thought about Bill, his strange American friend.)

\--

There had to have been a certain amount of culture shock. Bill had expected it to be minimal, if for no other reason than because he had expected that all of them would be speaking English. (And to be honest, he’d watched enough of BBC that he thought it wouldn’t even be that difficult to figure out what words were unfamiliar to him.) 

Then there was the young lady in the coffee shop that had been pleasant and polite and indifferent to him. It was the sort of attitude you got from anywhere that dealt with a great influx of tourists. But her face changed, and her smile brightened into something that seemed just shy of feral when she took his credit card from him. 

“William Masters,” she said, “I bet your  _ friends _ call you  _ Bill _ .”

“Some do,” he said. That was, if he had any friends left when he made it back from his exile. His wife had called him Bill, and Virginia had called him Bill, and Betty called him Dr. Masters as a matter of politeness during business hours. But she had called him Bill as she shoved him out the door. He stood on his side of the counter, with his hands still gripped around his wallet.

Dawn (her name tag said) stood on the other, holding his card with her fingertips, taking stock of him. She was sliding her eyes over him in a way that, removed from the strangeness of the situation and the obvious age difference, would have read as sexual. It was intense, and focused, and it was definitely sizing him up for something.

“Is there something wrong with the card?” he asked. 

“Oh.” It seemed like an afterthought, as if the notion of running the card had completely escaped her mind. “No. It’s fine.” She ran it through without incident and handed it back across the counter with a smile. “I hope you enjoy your time in Broadchurch, Mr. Masters.”

“ _ Doctor _ Masters,” he said. “Should I wait here?”

“No at the end of the counter,” she said.

Bill stood at the end, feeling a bit like a sideshow spectacle. Dawn had slid into the space next to the barista and the pair of them were standing by the sink with the water running. It was loud enough to drown out their whispers, but it did absolutely nothing to cancel out the sideways glances they kept shooting over at him. If it had been home, where he was notorious for sex research (or just being a pervert depending on your system of morals), he wouldn’t have thought much of it. He tried not to get too involved in the judgments of others as long those judgments weren’t being spit into his face. 

You just couldn’t tell people what to think.

But here. He hadn’t expected it here. He hadn’t expected to be recognized as anyone worthy of note here. By the time the coffee was poured, and the muffin was bagged, Bill wasn’t even sure he wanted them. His stomach was a knot of indignation. He was just short of telling the pair of them that you couldn’t run a business while gossiping about your customers, no matter who you thought they were.

But the barista slid the cup across the counter and said, “I’m really sorry about that. We’ve just had a tragedy and I think the whole town just needs something a bit lighthearted, you know? I think we just want to be distracted. Please give us another chance and we’ll be on our best behavior.” There was genuine sincerity in her voice, and an echo of the words, that bone-deep need to escape the stress of days past.

(Bill had always turned to liquor, and liquor had always failed him, but old habits and whatnot.) 

“Of course,” he said.

“Sorry,” Dawn said, “Enjoy your stay.”

“Thank you,” he said again. He took his coffee and his muffin. Out on the street, he was left feeling oddly out of place. As if he had become the center of attention. It was a strange feeling on a lazy mid-morning street. There was hardly anyone out to even glance in his direction and no reason to think that anyone cared. But he couldn’t shake the sensation regardless. There were eyes, somewhere, staring right at him.

Still, he couldn’t go home, and he didn’t want to go back to the hotel. So he took his coffee and his muffin and he went left just to keep from standing still.

–

Hardy’s head was pounding before noon. It had become an almost unbearable fist of pain by the early afternoon. He had reached his limit for nonsense and incompetence long-long-long before Miller pulled him into a coffee shop to grab a cup. (Not that he was interested in coffee, or something to eat, or being in public,

or anything but a dark place where he could be still for a moment.) His aching body felt like he was dragging it across hard rocks and no matter how hard he tried to be pleasant, he found himself glaring at anything that came too close to him.

“Oh!” the girl behind the counter said, “I saw him.” It was the tone of gossip. Of course it was, the town thrived on  _ gossip _ . It was more essential to the whole lot of them than the law, or the weather or–or food. It was  _ gossip _ that got them up in the morning. “He didn’t look at all like I thought he would.”

“Shh,” Miller said with a calming hand and a sideways head tilt toward Hardy that seemed to indicate this particular gossip wasn’t fit for manly ears. (Or his ears, specifically, but it could have gone either way.)

“Oh, of course. Very American, though,” she said with a wink.

Miller stood at the end of the counter, taking up space and wasting their time while the barista behind the counter went about making whatever awful concoction had been ordered. The smell of the place was making Hardy want to vomit. (Well, that was unfair, he had started developing the want to vomit regardless of circumstance lately.) “You sure you didn’t want a cup of tea? You’ve got a pinch,” she motioned at his face. “And what’s this, you’re all...” her shoulders hunched forward, her body shifted to resemble some sort of monster stance as her hands hooked into claws.

Hardy did not have the energy to concern himself with deciphering what she was saying. “What’s the town gossip now?” he asked, “what am I not supposed to hear?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Miller said with too much enthusiasm. It was a denial too strong to be believed. Her drink arrived with convenient speed and Hardy was able to glare at the barista just to see how she’d react. The girl did look every so slightly ashamed, but she didn’t blurt out any confessions. 

“Miller,” he said when they were outside again. “I don’t have time for gossip, I don’t have time for clandestine whispering. If there’s something going on and it’s got anything to do with me or this case or  _ you _ , I need to know about it. We can’t afford anything to distract from the investigation–”

“Oh, you can’t?” Miller repeated, “funny you saying that now.  _ You _ can’t afford anything from distracting us from the investigation, can you? Is that what you think my family is? A distraction? Should I call up my boys? Should I phone my husband, tell him I can’t come home? Tell him I’m sorry but he’s a distraction. That’s just like you, sir. You’re allowed whatever distractions you’d like. I bet you don’t even call them distractions when you’re off travelling with your  _ friend _ . I bet Bill isn’t a distraction, but I’m not allowed any.”

“Bill?” Hardy repeated, “for the last time Miller, drop  _ it _ . There’s nothing. It’s not some–”

And just there, between his headache and the soreness of his body, nestled into the curve of the bruises under is clothes, was the  _ realization _ . There it was, the unwanted answer. The woman at the till had said  _ I saw him  _ and she had said  _ Very American _ . And there was only one person in recent events, that shouldn’t be spoken about in front of Hardy, that was American, and would create a sensation in this gossipy little hellhole. “ _ Miller _ ,” he growled.

“You can’t blame me,” Miller said. “You’re lucky they didn’t print it in the paper, grouchy, thin Detective Inspector has a  _ friend _ .”

What could Hardy do? Caught between a quick lie and the truth that needed to be hidden. He had things to do that didn’t involve nosy doctors that would take him off the job. He had things to do that couldn’t wait another moment. His heart was a failing, fragile thing in his chest. He wasn’t going to  _ die _ before he finished this. “That’s great,” he snapped, “I’m sure he enjoys being a spectacle. Did you tell them to have the decency to leave him alone? Did you tell them to do their best not to embarrass themselves and the whole town? I’m allowed to have friends, or aren’t I?”

Miller didn’t look offended. She didn’t look remotely worried about his grouchiness. (Not that she usually did, but at least, with some things his venomous words made some kind of impact. This time she was just watching him with a smile twitching at the corner of her lips, like he was confirming an idea of hers.) “I’ll tell them,” she promised, “should I go in now?”

“Leave it,” Hardy said.

And her smile was an insult following him back to the car.

\--

It would have been nice to blend in with a crowd on the beach. Bill had been looking to find some kind of anonymity in numbers, but the beach was mostly barren. The waves were battering the empty shore, and the sand itself had the look of having gone untouched by anything heavier than a light wind. It was funny how it was  _ this _ , a stretch of abandoned beach, that made his chest ache. 

He had made it through Betty’s well-meaning speech about how he needed to take a break, and how  _ they _ (although he got the impression it was mostly just her) needed a break from  _ him _ . As if  _ he _ had done something unforgivable just  _ now _ instead of the variety of sins he’d been concealing all these years. That was the part that didn’t make any sense to him, the part that left him feeling like he’d missed some part of his own life. 

No, no.

He hadn’t missed it; he just hadn’t been as good a liar as he thought he was. He had been playing a game with the pretense of privacy. He’d been demanding everyone keep secrets and he had thought those secrets were undetectable. There was no reason for Libby (his  _ wife,  _ his  _ goddamn  _ wife) to have known that he had been sleeping with another woman all these years. And yet, when he thought back through it, when he assessed the desperation to be nearer to Virginia, he thought how stupid he had been to think Libby wouldn’t know. His wife, his beautiful wife, had been promised fidelity and she’d settled for predictability. She had known the whole time.

All Bill had done was tell the truth, at  _ last _ . It had been a relief to be faced with consequences; but he might have kept his secret if he’d known how Libby would scream at him, how she would tell him all the secrets she’d been keeping. How she’d settled into a lackluster life of being the wife of a sullen, angry man. How she’d accepted that she was second-best, last thought of, and how she had convinced herself that it was  _ okay _ .

Oh hell, all alone on an empty beach, sitting on his ass in the sand, the only thing that Bill could feel in all the world was the horror of the echoing realization of Libby’s agony. He was a selfish bastard of a man, and he deserved to feel the hopelessness that washed over him now.

He deserved to wonder where his life would go. He deserved to wonder who would stand by him when the dust settled, and to know that he’d made such a mess of things that there was nobody left to care. He deserved to wonder what his children must think of their father.

There was no anonymity on this empty beach, but there was nobody there to see him press the heels of his hands against his eyes and give up the fight against the inevitability. All alone, out on the beach, he was safe to cry as long as he liked.

–

Alec had never been more ready for a shower and his bed. Miller had been full of twinkly assumptions when he’d said there was no point in sitting around the office staring at things they already knew, waiting for inspiration to hit them. (He might have been doing just that, but his body ached in a way that couldn’t be ignored a moment longer.) He dragged himself through the door of the hotel, hoping to get away with being avoided. 

It all looked so promising, as if he just might be able to make it to his room without incident, except that he could hear them in the next room. Their intrigued voices, whisper-shouting to one another.

“We don’t know anything about it,” was the good Reverend, being the calmest voice of reason in a village full of excitable idiots. (Unless he was a murderer. Then he was a very polite psychopath that preyed on prepubescent boys.) “Its none of our business.”

“But he was crying,” Becca said. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it, it didn’t even sound like it was the first time she’d had this conversation. No, her tone was full of confidence, the way you got when you knew you had the right answer because you’d already convinced someone to believe you. “Right out on the beach, he was  _ crying _ .”

“That doesn’t mean–” Reverend Paul tried.

“I heard that shitface was yelling at Aunt Ellie outside a coffee shop. Dawn didn’t hear everything but she said that it looked very tense and that it definitely had to do with the gossip around town.” That was Olly, the junior reporter, full of circumstantial (incorrect) facts. 

“Well, it’s not very inconspicuous is it? Staying in the same hotel?” 

Reverend Paul sighed, “that doesn’t mean–”

“I’m sure they’re just ‘ _ friends’,”  _ was said with audible air-quotes. Becca was moving things around while she spoke. “I don’t care. I’m just saying that you can’t go off getting angry at people taking an interest whenever you’re…  _ flaunting _ it.”

“Flaunting?” Paul repeated.

“I haven’t seen him yet, the American. What’s he look like?”

“I don’t know,” Becca said, “like an American. He’s a doctor but he looks too scruffy to be any doctor I’d want to see.”

“What’s his name?” Olly asked. “I could look him up.”

“No,” Paul said, “come on. We are not researching people on the internet, that’s uncalled for.”

“Is it?” Olly said it like there was no point in trying to protest on the basis of privacy and morality. “Seems like it’s the only thing that shitface has been doing since he got here. It's about time someone did the same to him. Figure out all his dirty little secrets.”

“William Masters,” Becca said, “it’s not exactly a secret. Everyone knows about the American lover he stashed in my hotel. I’ve had more people stopping by for a drink today than since I’ve opened. It’s been great for business.”

Reverend Paul made a noise in his throat that was a groan and a scoff of disgust which didn’t quite mean as much when he was doing nothing at all to stop the proceedings. 

Hardy thought about stepping into the room. He thought about telling them all exactly how despicable they were. He considered pointing out that he wasn’t hiding a secret American lover. But there was no point in it. The rumor had developed its own beating heart and the only way to let it die now was to starve it until it passed. Certainly there had been worse things thought of him than his secret gay love affair. 

In fact, in comparison to the notion of being a colossal fuck up and allowing a child murderer to go free, being gay was a pleasant assumption for someone to make. Bill was perfectly nice looking too, and he was a  _ doctor _ . There was nothing malicious in the rumor, and aside from the awkwardness of the town converging on the American stranger, there was no reason to fight it.

Hardy was  _ tired _ , and the day was so close to over. He left them to finish their giggling gossip.


	2. Chapter 2

Bill had taken the precaution of preparing himself to be stared at. It was always easier to handle being the center of attention when you had stood in front of the mirror that morning, reminding yourself it was only curiosity. There was nothing wrong with a bit of healthy interest. (An excess in interest, though, that left a man feeling every so slightly slimy. There was just something about the slide of long stares across his body that left him with a film of disgust on his skin. He certainly wished he’d never learned the difference, but there was no going back now.) 

He had attempted to look casual, like anyone might try to look when they were out on vacation. Contrary to popular belief at his office, he  _ did  _ own t-shirts. He just didn’t have any  _ here _ . Betty could only pack what she had access to, and the only clothes he’d rescued from Libby had been the ones she hadn’t already thrown out or burned. 

Casual was the effect he was hoping for, but the best he’d managed was rolled up sleeves and the top few buttons of his shirt left undone. Even his shoes were shiny, like a beacon to draw in attention. He might as well taken to introducing himself as Dr. Bill Masters. I cheated on my wife and got kicked out of the country, I professional observe couples having sex.

Might have been easier to just say ‘cheating pervert’.

The young woman who owned the hotel did not stop him on his way out. She had been distracted by an oversized crowd in her sitting room. (Or bar? Or dining room. He wasn’t clear on what it was other than it had tables and served beer, maybe.) It allowed him to escape without too much fuss. The air was still crisp, and fresh. 

Bill walked without any sense of direction, until he found himself walking along a path that took him closer and closer to the edge of the cliff he’d seen from the beach below. It was  _ breathtaking _ , like a fist in his chest that robbed his body of oxygen. It was amazing how small it left him feeling, and how beautiful it was to feel so small. 

He might have stood there, enraptured in an unfamiliar feeling of smallness and beauty if not for the crude, unwanted interjection of, “for fucks sake,” that sounded a little bit like the skinny stupid man that was fine with dying alone. 

Bill turned toward the sound of the voice, and there was the bastard himself. There was a faint blush of color in his face, a shivering restoration of strength to his limbs. His voice was scraped out of his throat, and his face was twisted up in disbelieving disapproval. (No it was harder than that, it wasn’t disapproval, it was something like distaste that was bridging into disgust.) He didn’t say another word but turned immediately and walked away.

“No wait a minute!” Bill shouted after him as he stumbled after him. (That came from wearing dress shoes in damp grass.) It was easy to catch a man with a heart like Alec Hardy’s. It wasn’t like he was even capable of moving fast enough to avoid a turtle, much less a full grown man. His arm was thin as bones when Bill’s hand caught it, and the man whipped around so fast it was unthinkable it wasn’t followed with some kind of blow: a punch, a kick, an open handed slap. 

They were staring at one another, Hardy glaring with contempt and Bill catching his breath (and trying to reason out why he was so vile to the man). “Just stay well away from me,” Hardy said.

“I have no interest in being near you,” Bill snapped back. And then, more importantly, “you live here?”

Hardy looked like he would rather answer any question in the world but that one. (Or maybe he just didn’t want to admit that he, too, had been sent here by forces beyond his control.) “Unfortunately. I mean it, stay away from me. I don’t have time for you.” He half turned, stopped, and glanced back at him, as if he were judging if Bill would try to grab him again. Then he turned in full and stalked away.

No amount of imagination or scientific hypothesizing could have prepared him for this moment. He had stood in his mirror to prepare himself for nosy baristas, but how could he have known that ill-tempered dying detectives would sneer at him with something that felt almost like hatred. And what did it even mean,  _ I don’t have time for you _ ? 

Bill hadn’t even been asking for time.

He hadn’t been asking for anything, but an explanation. (Maybe. Maybe just  _ someone _ that looked almost familiar to him.) Betty would have loved it, seeing him struck dumb and offended, lost on a cliff side. She would have died laughing, with a little wink because he’d left so many people feeling the way he felt right now, it was about time he got a taste of it. 

The morning had only started, and now it felt hopelessly ruined. (And since there was no hope of improvement, there was nothing stopping him from going back to the coffee shop to be gawked at.)

–

There were far worse things to be than gay. Being routinely referred to as  _ shitface _ behind his back came to mind. And if the whole of his coworkers were going to call him such a charming nickname, they could have at least done so with secrecy. The longer he stayed, the less they seemed to care about the pretense of respect. Miller was the last stronghold against the brewing dislike for him. Even Miller’s amusement at his foulness was as unwelcome and abrasive. Hardy didn’t mind being disliked as long as the investigation proceeded properly.

He didn’t mind being thought of as gay, either.

But he didn’t have  _ time _ to fuel any rumors about the sex life that he wasn’t even capable of having. He wasn’t capable of having  _ anything _ but a matter of months which was quickly narrowing down to  _ weeks _ . His body could feel the failing of his heart, and it left him with a sense of  _ dread _ that couldn’t be ignored.

He’d read somewhere that this was how it felt when you knew you were going to die. He remembered seeing it in an article, lost somewhere in late-night wandering through the internet. He couldn’t remember now if it were true or not, but the idea had stuck with him. It had been at the back of his mind so long that it had become a  _ fact _ . (After all, anything could be true if you believed it long enough.) The body knew when it was wrong and there was no mistaking that, regardless of the spryness of his mind and the bitterness of his soul, his body was  _ wrong _ .

Hardy was  _ dying _ .

He couldn’t have been fucking an American Doctor even if he’d wanted to. He couldn’t fuck anyone. He could hardly stand a brisk walk. He couldn’t even manage an intense emotion without his chest crushing itself. He could feel the fist of pain starting, and his head was spinning before he’d even made it back to the hotel. He had intended to go straight to work, but there was no hope in making it there now.

He got through the door without collapsing, let it slam behind him with no sense of decorum or shame. Becca leaned out of the doorway of her gathered assembling of snoops to squint at him with concern. She said, “are you alright,” as he walked past. “Hey,” she called after him. Her feet were shuffling after him, because she knew enough about him to know that he was  _ not _ . “Do you need an ambulance?”

“No.” Hardy snapped back, “I forgot...” what could have possibly forgotten, “a file. I’m fine.” His voice was even enough that he could almost believe himself. He lost her in the hallway, she didn’t follow him the whole way to his room. That was a small miracle.

Hardy wasn’t interested in thanking God for anything lately, but he spared the idea of a prayer to be thankful that he made it all the way to his room before his legs turned rubbery. He lurched for the bottle of pills he’d left on the bedside table. He landed on his knees against the bed, collapsing sideways so he could sit. His hands were shaking as he opened the bottle and pushed the pill into his mouth.

The pain was as  _ intense _ as the anger. The anger was useless, it wouldn’t keep him alive. The anger was a reminder of everything he was losing, or had lost, or still had just enough time to lose. He’d lost his wife, and he’d lost his reputation, and he’d lost his daughter. He’d let a child murderer go free and he couldn’t sleep without remembering it, remembering the exact  _ second _ that he’d found out.

There were two dead little girls out there that couldn’t have justice for what was done to them. There was a murderer free, toasting Alec Hardy as the fuck up who let him go. 

And Hardy was here, pressing a fist against his own chest, feeling a well of fury and unfairness that could have drowned any man. Hardy was  _ here _ , right now, taking his time about  _ dying _ . 

Not just yet. Not until he found the man who killed Danny Latimer.

–

It was not paranoia to say that Bill was being watched. The whole of Broadchurch seemed as if it had a hive mind, and every eye in the place was tracking his movements with the same incredible scrutiny as a spy network in a television show. More troubling than the sensation of being watched, was the fact that no matter how intently he was stared at, nobody seemed like they wanted to tell him why. 

And then there was Olly Stevens, a  _ boy _ with a press badge, that invited himself to sit across from Bill at his table-for-one at lunch. He had the look of having just graduated high school and the swagger of an idiot child. 

“Hello,” the boy said before he stuck his hand across the table, “I’m Olly Stevens.”

Bill glanced sideways, toward the door, the waitress, and the hostess who had greeted him when he came in. None of them seemed as if they were very interested in how his lunch had been interrupted by a stranger. When he glanced back, Olly’s hand was still stretched across the table at him. Bill set his silverware down and wiped his mouth with his napkin, “do I know you?” he asked.

“I’m Olly Stevens,” the boy repeated with his hand still lingering in the air.

“Then I don’t know you.” Bill had never had a problem getting people to leave him alone. Where he lived, his face was well known as one of the least likable but most competent professionals in any field he’d undertaken. But here, the best his glower managed was to get Olly’s embarrassing hand to lower back to his side.

The boy was still smiling. “No, I guess you don’t. I work at the  _ Broadchurch Echo _ .” (Bill was going to write Betty a very strongly worded letter when he got back to his hotel room, explaining all of his feelings about being sent away to a town where his mere presence seemed to excite some sort of frenzy.) “I was just wondering if I could ask you a few questions?”

“No,” Bill said. He picked up his utensils again, because they added a nice punctuation to the end of his denial. And the idiot boy was still sitting there, caught in a moment of confusion, but showing no signs of being deterred in the slightest. 

“I was just wondering–forgive me if I’m being forward–but I was just wondering why an American sex researcher was here in Broadchurch?”

“I did say no,” Bill reminded him. “Why would you ask permission to ask questions if you were going to ask them anyway?”

“Are you thinking of relocating your sex research?”

To Broadchurch? The town that was so excited by a visitor it lost its fucking mind? Bill set his utensils down again and smiled at the idiot who couldn’t take a hint. He said, “excuse me,” as he slid out of his seat because he had been raised to appreciate the importance of manners. 

“You don’t have to go,” Olly said in a rush, “you see, I really want to know how you know DI Hardy.” The words were spoken so fast there was almost no spaces between them. And Olly had only turned in his seat to look at Bill, he hadn’t even had time to stand up to follow. His arm was hooked over the back of his seat as his slack-worried face slowly turned up into a smile. That was a reporter’s instinct, the moment they all seemed to know that against all logic and good intentions, the person they had come to harass was well and truly hooked.

“DI Hardy?” Bill repeated. The very man who was ignoring every bit of medical advice he must have received. The one that was a walking ghost at this moment. The one that accosted him in a public space to tell him to stay well away as if Bill had shown up here just to annoy him. “Why do you think I know him?”

“Oh, come on,” Olly said.

The waitress that had been ignoring them was now listening so obnoxiously, it was amazing her ears hadn’t overtaken her head. Bill was grasping at some realization that was just beyond his understanding. He was on the verge of making everything  _ make _ sense. All those knowing stares, and the cryptic giggles, and the slightly strange small talk. “I really don’t know what you’re implying.” But it certainly didn’t seem to have anything to do with Alec Hardy’s heart condition. That left him wondering what else there was to–

“Olly,” the hostess said, “leave the man alone or I’ll call your Aunt Ellie and Maggie.”

Aunt Ellie. Bill turned to look at the woman and then back at Olly who still hadn’t managed to be even slightly ashamed of his horrendous behavior. The name was so close to being familiar that it felt like he knew it without knowing why. 

Olly managed a half-realized attempt at saying, “sorry,” as he stepped around him. When he left any chance of figuring out how he’d become linked to Alec Hardy went with him. Bill was left standing in place, searching out any sort of logical idea and finding none.

–

Miller was looking at him. No, that wasn’t the right way to phrase it. Miller wasn’t looking at him, she was  _ glancing _ at him. She was sneaking peeks at him when she thought he wouldn’t notice. They were the smug, knowing sort of glances that she spared him whenever she thought she knew something about him that he hadn’t said. 

No, these quick looks had guilt in them. 

And she should be guilty, for shifting her focus away from the murder of a boy that she knew to  _ him _ . As if his imaginary sex life was more important. (And they were close, he could feel it, they were  _ so _ close.)

“Miller,” he said when he couldn’t stand it a moment longer. He dropped the file he’d been reading (again) to stare back at her with none of the attempted slyness she’d been employing. “What is it?”

“Sir?”

He hated that about her, the coyness, as if she hadn’t been caught outright. Now he had to say that he’d seen her, and that implied that he’d been looking back at her, and they would have to argue which one of them was paranoid. Hardy said nothing, just stared at her with skepticism that he hoped conveyed that he was simply too busy to get sidetracked again.

“Alright,” she said, “before I tell you, don’t go off getting all...” she dropped the file she was looking over on the seat next to her as she turned to face him more fully, “grouchy. I’m sure that it can all be resolved, and remember that I was not involved at all, so if you are going to get grouchy, you should do so at the right person.”

(That person most definitely being Miller herself.)

Miller drew in a breath, pressed her hands against her lap, and then said, “I  _ heard _ ,” so whatever she was saying was hearsay, “my nephew Olly,”

“The reporter?” Hardy asked.

“Are you going to let me speak?” Miller asked. 

He motioned for her to continue.

“He works at the  _ Broadchurch Echo.  _ Well, I heard that he interrupted  _ Bill _ ,” it seemed impossible for Miller to say the man’s name without a tone of disbelief and amusement, “while he was having lunch. I don’t know what was being said, but now there’s a rumor around that  _ Bill _ is Bill Masters, who is apparently a somewhat famous American sex researcher.”

For Christ’s sake.

Hardy didn’t have the energy to react to the news. He couldn’t even lie and say that he had known, because he didn’t know the man from any other stranger. It had been an accident that they’d met at all, and a disaster that the man had ended up here. And  _ of course _ he was an American sex researcher. Of course he was, because the town of Broadchurch had decided that Hardy was fucking him, and he couldn’t just have a perfectly normal gay fling with any man, he had to have one with an  _ American sex researcher _ . 

Hardy pulled his glasses off and dropped them on the desk. His fingers were dry and rough, pressing against his eyes like he could make the whole stupid thing come undone.

“I’ll call him as soon as we’re done here, sir. I’ll talk to him. And Maggie Radcliffe–”

Maggie Radcliffe was another reporter, and regardless of her apparent morals and her adherence to some ethic code, she was  _ still _ a reporter. A reporter with access to an  _ American sex researcher _ and his lover, a somewhat disgraced detective working on a murder case. Even if Maggie wouldn’t sell the headlines, Olly would because the boy was made of ambition.

Even if Maggie didn’t, there was Karen  _ fucking _ White to think of. By the time his hand had fallen away from his face, Miller had returned to looking at the file she’d be rereading. As if nothing had been said, and an innocent man’s life wasn’t going to be completely upended by the misconceptions of these fucking small-minded people.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” Hardy asked.

Miller looked properly ashamed when she looked at him then, and good for her since she was the one that started it all. “No,” was the sound of the woman that did want to know, but wasn’t going to ask now that the whole thing had gotten out of hand. 

He nodded, thought how nice a drink would be, and then pushed himself out of the chair. “I’m getting a cup of tea.” He didn’t offer or imply that he meant to offer, and Miller was good enough to say nothing at all.

\--

After an afternoon of wandering, searching through the town for any indication of the headquarters of the  _ Broadchurch Echo _ , Bill had simply given up and headed back to the hotel. He’d been all set to put the odd, stupid day behind him when the  _ Broadchurch Echo _ seemed to find him. Conveniently placed directly across the street from his hotel, that was. It was so easy to find that he’d spent a few hours not finding it out of the stubborn feeling that if he asked  _ anyone _ for direction, he’d only fuel whatever rumors and half-thoughts they were already developing about him.

And not just him. Him and Alec Hardy. 

Bill’s reputation had suffered enough bruising that it almost couldn’t get any worse. He certainly never needed help in damaging it further; he was perfectly capable of coming up with new heights of stupidity on his own. But, it didn’t seem very fair to let his mistakes drag another man down with him.

The doors to the newspaper headquarters were open to the breeze. The young woman behind the counter looked at him like she expected to recognize him, and didn’t, and only at the last moment remembered to say, “good afternoon,” and “can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge,” Bill said. He remembered hearing the name Ellie and Maggie, but he couldn’t be sure which one of them was relevant to the newspaper. Bill had a manner of speaking that made everyone uncomfortable; Betty said it was like being sent to the principal, or standing in front of a judge in your underwear. No matter what Bill was saying, he said it with severity and people were always put off by it. 

The woman here looked sideways and then back at him, “uh, can I tell her what it concerns?”

“Yes, I was  _ accosted _ during my lunch by Olly Stevens. He says he works here and I’d like an explanation.”

The woman couldn’t muster even the faintest sense of surprise at those words. She smiled an apology she didn’t say, and motioned over to a small seating area at the front. “I’ll go and find her,” she said.

Bill was not going to sit on display in the front window of the newspaper. He stayed at the counter, looking down at what passed for headlines in this town. He’d expected some manner of excitement over fish, or an  exposé on a disliked neighbor. He wasn’t ready to be confronted with the story of a child’s murder. He hadn’t expected to read anything disparaging about DI Alec Hardy, but he was three-fourths through an article when a polite cough interrupted him. 

“I’m Maggie Radcliffe, the editor.” She extended her hand in greeting and Bill set the paper back on the counter. “Please, take a copy.”

“Yes, thank you,” Bill said as he shook her hand. He folded the paper over and tucked it under his arm. “Is there somewhere less in the public view where we can talk? I’m sure you understand that I don’t really want advertise this visit.”

“Sure,” Maggie led the way through the building to her cramped, dusty office. It smelled like newsprint, and ink, and  _ age _ . There was a rickety chair to sit on and a door that very nearly closed. She turned her attention to him solely, “Olly interrupted your lunch?” she prompted.

“That’s putting it mildly.” Bill set the paper in his lap and cleared his throat, “I’m vacationing here. I’ve had the feeling since I arrived that I’ve somehow become a spectacle. And today, while I was trying to enjoy my dinner, one of your reporters interrupted me to ask if I had plans to move my sex study here and what my relationship to Alec Hardy is.”

Maggie was annoyed, but there was no knowing which part was annoying to her. “I’m very sorry about that,” she said. But with no indication if she was sorry that he was offended or sorry that it had happened. “I’ll talk to him. He gets over-excited, forgets what is and isn’t acceptable. I’ll send him over to make an apology. You’re staying at the hotel across the street?”

“Yes,” Bill said. He cleared his throat before he could be shuttled out the door, “The thing is,” interrupted what Maggie seemed to think was a complete conversation, “what I’m most interested in knowing is why people seem to think there is a relationship between Alec Hardy and I, and exactly what sort of relationship they think it is.”

Maggie had the face of a woman who had seen more than any person ought to have seen. She had the body of someone who had done her share of interrupting lunches and hunting down sources. Life had given her plenty to write about, and it had left plenty of marks along the way. And here she sighed and leaned back into her chair. “To be very blunt, the feeling is that you’re having an affair with DI Hardy.”

“Why?” Bill asked.

“You were travelling together, you were with him in the hospital, you’re staying at the same hotel. I heard he was yelling at Ellie about–”

“Who is Ellie?” Bill asked.

“Ellie Miller? She works with him. I wouldn’t say she’s his partner, but since she’s the only one that will voluntarily work with him, she might as well be considered a partner.”

Ellie was the woman that had come to collect Hardy from the hospital, the one that had been so amused to hear Bill’s first name. Bill rubbed his forehead with his fingers and tried to figure out what could be done  _ now _ . It didn’t matter that the evidence was stupid, or that he hadn’t been travelling with Hardy. This rumor the town had created required no facts to be sustainable, because it was built on Hardy’s unpleasant face. 

It was almost like a bad joke.

“Well,” he said, “thank you.” He got up and waited for Maggie to pull the door open. She pointed him toward the front and had the decency to say  _ sorry _ as he left. 

–

Hardy wanted a drink more than anything he’d ever wanted in the whole of his life. He just wanted to drown the stupidity of his sorrows in liquor until the world faded around him. He hadn’t even been the sort of man that indulged in that manner of escapism. 

No, Hardy had always been the same. He’d always been driven by the here, the now, and the terrible notion that every person on this forsaken planet was  _ alone _ . He’d been waiting for something to prove him wrong, he’d been willing to hear arguments to disprove him but life had taught him that there were no grand gestures. There was no sense in this world, and there was no hope of it ever making sense.

Justice was the idea he’d subscribed to. The law was the rule he’d decided to follow.

And now he was a skinny  _ shitface _ of a man, dragging his body back to the hotel he called home. Becca was there with a smile, and the distant sound of a bar full of patrons hoping to learn something new and  _ juicy _ about the rumor spreading through Broadchurch. 

Hardy had every intention of leaving it alone. There was nothing to gain by protesting. If anything, it would just convince them all they were right and the last thing he wanted was anyone knowing his opinion on the matter. (What did the truth matter, really?) But his feet brought him to a halt, and then back, and he was standing in front of Becca with a sour frown and the desperate need for a drink. “Is it really that exciting?” he asked.

“What?” Becca asked.

“The idea of me fucking someone,” he said. Because that’s who he was right now, he was a coarse, foul-mouthed man on a ledge. He had nothing to lose and no reason to be polite when there was an audience gagging for tidbits to add to their circumstantial collection. He didn’t stay for her sputtering denial, “good night,” was how he left her. 

The stairs mocked him, and the hallway seemed to grow longer-and-longer the more steps he took. He’d been hoping for a drink, but he was  _ praying _ he made it into his room before his legs gave out. His heart was getting worse, but he just needed a few more days to close this case. He was so  _ near _ to the end of it now.

“You really are an idiot,” was the sound of his fictional American lover, and the feel of his arm sliding around Hardy’s back. He was pulled straight upright without realizing he’d listed to the side. “Which one’s your room?”

“No,” Hardy said.

“We could go to mine,” Bill offered.

“No,” Hardy said with more force. He tried to pull away and Bill’s grip tightened around his ribs. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Oh, I’ve heard,” Bill said. “Which one’s your room?”

Hardy couldn’t save a man that didn’t want saving. He directed them to the door and leaned against the wall while Bill opened it for him. They stumbled in together, two grown men trying to fit through the same doorway. He collapsed on the bed and Bill shut the door behind him. He stood there for a moment, observing the bad idea he’d involved himself in. “I’m not gay,” Hardy said, like it mattered. “Not typically.”

Bill snorted, he pulled a stethoscope out of his back pocket. “Open your shirt,” he said.

“You just had that?” Hardy asked. He shrugged his coat and his suit jacket off, and pulled at his tie. He took a break with it half-loosened and let his head hang back. His body was singing, just thrumming, and his head was starting to ache. The pills were in his pocket but the moment might pass. 

Bill was pulling his tie free, as if he regularly undressed strangers. (And he might, what with being a sex researcher and all, who knew?) He fumbled at the buttons but managed to get enough of them open that he could get the bell of the stethoscope flat to his chest. “Just breathe normally,” he said.

“What sort of doctor are you?”

“Shh.”

“What sort of doctor studies sex?”

“I’m an obstetrician, now could you please be quiet, I’m trying to listen to your heart.” And if he determined it was bad enough he was going to force Hardy into a hospital again, no doubt. All doctors were like that, admonishing and lecturing and prodding at him about how he was going to die. As if he he didn’t know, as if they had told him some news he’d been too stupid to notice himself. 

Hardy was quiet until Bill leaned back away from him. “Obstetrician, that’s a baby doctor?”

“It’s women’s reproductive system, pregnancy and birth doctor. Once the baby is born, they are generally looked after by a pediatrician or a neonatologist.” He hooked the stethoscope around his neck and stood there with an expression that wanted to be severe but settled for annoyed. “You have to start taking care of yourself.”

“How’d you find out?” Hardy asked.

“About us?” Bill asked. He looked around for somewhere to sit and found a chair that he could pull close enough they weren’t shouting across the room at one another. “A reporter named Olly Stevens interrupted my lunch to ask me what my intentions in Broadchurch were. He seemed to think they included you.”

Hardy turned on the bed so he could lean against the headboard. “Sorry,” he said.

“Worse things have been said about me.”

Well, at least they had that in common. Hardy nodded and looked toward the door. “Am I going to live?”

“You should make it through the night, I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving you an idea beyond that.”

“I’m really tired,” Hardy said.

For a minute, Bill looked as if he wanted to start yelling. There were a great many things he might want to yell, they seemed to stack up behind his face but not a single one of them made it to his mouth. He only smiled, polite and indifferent, and stood up again. “I’ll leave you my number. Call me if you start getting symptoms, and call for an ambulance. I’d hate them to think I killed you.”

Hardy snorted at that. “I can see the headline, worst cop in the world killed by American’s cock.” He took the slip of paper that Bill offered him and nodded his thanks.

“My secretary would frame the paper that printed it, hang it in the lobby of my practice.” He lingered a moment to be sure that Hardy wasn’t going to keel over and then let himself out. The quiet he left behind was almost companionable. Good natured, at least. It was nice to know that the only person likely to be damaged by the nonsense rumors found them as stupid as Hardy did.

He gave up sitting up, and staying awake, and the idea that he should change his clothes. His bed was warm and ready for him, and he was very ready for it.


	3. Chapter 3

The knocking was more like tapping; it was a sound that was asking politely not to be heard. Bill would have been just as happy to pretend he hadn’t heard it, but he had. While he’d been called everything, from bastard to motherfucker to asshole, he had never  _ actually _ been called impolite. No, Bill Masters was (at his core) a technically polite person. It was that sense of obligation that dragged him from his bed, found yesterday’s shirt to pull on, and shuffled him from bedside to door. His sluggish feet and his blurry eyes had taken a half-breath too long, because the knocking had ceased and the space in front of his door was empty.

Alec was striding away from him, moving with more energy and purpose than a man with a heart like his could really afford.

“Did you need something?” Bill called. He kept one hand on his own door and one foot in his own doorway. He was wearing nothing but his white boxers and yesterday’s button down; it simply wouldn’t help matters if he was caught chasing after the man.

Alec turned before he got to the steps, looked at him with pinched disappointment, and then acute embarrassment. He jerked forward, like he was being pulled by the belt, and was back at Bill’s door in a minute. “Get back in there,” was a rush of words almost unidentifiable as English.

“Oh yes, this is much better,” Bill said when he’d been successfully crowded back into his room. He was standing inside the doorway and Alec was leaning in like he could actually use his stick-thin body to hide him.

“I lived through the night,” Alec stated.

“Congratulations,” Bill said. “How are you feeling now?”

“I’ve got to go,” Alec said instead. He didn’t bother to mention why he had to go, and he didn’t stay to explain why he’d gone out of his way to let Bill know about his continued survival. Instead he turned and walked away. “Close the door,” he called back over his shoulder. He was still muttering as he went down the stairs and out of sight.

Bill meant to do as he was told (but not because he was told), but just before he could get the door fully shut, he saw a brown haired woman staring at him with her mouth gaping open in shock and her eyes lighting up in absolute delight. Bill had enough experience to know, long before the woman moved to raise her camera phone, that he was standing half-dressed opposite a reporter. Instinct moved him before his conscious mind could catch up with him. He slammed the door shut, flicked the lock into place, and stood inside breathing harder than any man who hadn’t moved an inch should. 

“Fuck,” he said to the empty room. (And then he thought of Betty, lovely-lovely Betty who had sent him away to get his life together. Who had told him to move on. Who would be as delighted as that reporter to think that Bill Masters was having a gay fling and even _ more _ delighted to know the fully stupid situation he found himself in. Betty would take one look at Alec Hardy and grimace to herself, she’d assess his skinny limbs and shake her head in remorse. She’d tell him that there was no accounting for taste.)

–

It was as inconceivable to him that the Danny Latimer case could be solved with the unlikely reappearance of a skateboard as it was that it was being prevented from being solved by a God-damn dog. 

A fucking  _ dog _ .

No, not just a dog, it was a woman with a cruel face and a  _ dog _ . No, not just a woman with a cruel face and a  _ dog, _ but a woman with a cruel face, a  _ dog _ , and the unbelievable criminal that had  _ taken _ the _ dog _ . What sort of man  _ took _ someone’s dog?

Maybe it was the same sort of man as the reporters that were flocked around the  _ Broadchurch Echo _ , hoping to catch any indication of what was happening. Maybe it was the same sort of person as Olly Stevens, who had stared at him with particular interest throughout the arrest of Susan Wright. The stupid, young  _ boy _ hoping to be a proper reporter had followed after him like an over-eager puppy. 

Hardy didn’t like any reporter, but he especially didn’t like any reporter that didn’t have a head for what was and wasn’t a good idea. The sort that interrupted a man at lunch to ask him questions that had no worth to them. But Olly was a dumb bloodhound, following any scent that he didn’t recognize. 

“DI Hardy,” he said when there were far more important things to worry about.

“No questions,” Hardy said.

“No, it’s not about the case,” Olly said. “I was just wondering if you would comment on the rumors–”

“No.” Hardy said.

“It’s just that I heard from an eye witness that you–”

Hardy had been walking  _ away _ because he was trying to solve a murder, but the puppy at his back hadn’t stopped following him the whole time. Maggie was back in the doorway of the  _ Broadchurch Echo _ , frowning from a distance, but not moving an inch to intervene. Hardy could see her out of the corner of his eye when he turned around to face Olly. He took a step forward toward the idiot, and Maggie finally moved. Hardy said, “tell them all to  _ leave it _ . There’s real news, and there’s  _ gossip,  _ and it’s about time you learned the difference between the two.”

Maggie was there in a second, sliding herself into the confrontation without prompting. “Alright, alright,” she said, “come on, petal,” was directed at Olly, “we’ve had a long night. Let the police do their work.”

Hardy was frowning in disgust, and thrumming with outrage. He turned around to find Miller standing there, looking repentant and concerned. She was smart enough to know that nothing could be said that would make anything better. Maybe she’d only been amused when she found him with Bill, maybe she’d only told one other person and only because Hardy was a n unfriendly and friendless shitface. But they were here now, and there was no going back.

But that was hours back, before a headache, and a lost fucking dog. 

Miller came to find him in his office, looking sorry and carrying whatever passed for lunch today. She didn’t ask him if he wanted it (because that too was a lost cause) but step forward to set the package on the desk. She lingered at the door a moment before she finally said: “Sir. I didn’t mean–”

“Doesn’t matter,” Hardy said. He leaned back into the chair. “Find the dog yet?”

“We’ve got everyone looking,” she assured him.

“Good. We need the dog.” And that was, as far as he was concerned, all that needed to be said about that. 

But Miller stayed another moment and then said, “I  _ am _ sorry.” 

Hardy said nothing, and Miller nodded to herself and went back to her desk. As soon as she was gone, he picked up the lunch and dropped it in the wastebasket. (And it was childish, and stupid, and unkind, but he could be those things if he wanted.)

\--

Going to the hotel bar had been a mistake, just not for any of the reasons that seemed the most obvious. The mistake hadn’t been going for a drink. No, he’d secured himself an excuse back in his room, when he’d decided that he had only  _ quit _ drinking back home. He was  _ abroad _ now, and as the saying went, when in Broadchurch… 

Bill wasn’t entirely sure how big the town of Broadchurch really was, but it had the feeling of being a little place. He hadn’t met every resident but all the same it felt like everyone that mattered in the town had started meeting up in the bar just after dark. He’d heard them in passing, a great chattering of noise and laughter. 

The mistake had been assuming the rumors were replaced with more pressing news. He’d heard it out in the town, at lunch, and dinner, and when he stopped at a shop to get some chips (or crisps, as they called them) and something besides water to drink. There had been a Happening in the Latimer case. There had been Something that could _finally _bring justice for the boy. Bill hadn’t heard one sideways word about his affair with a police detective. He hadn’t seen even the shadow of a nosy reporter anywhere near him.

The hotel bar was filled with people, but not with noise. There was a man with a priest’s collar, and Olly the Obnoxious, and Becca, and the dark-haired woman who’d been trying to snap photos of him with her camera phone. There were others, grouped together and drinking, slow and deep. Heads had turned when he showed in the doorway, stares had lingered as he walked to the bar.

Becca had looked at him with wide eyes, her hands had pushed a rag across the counter top as she cleared her throat. When she spoke, her voice seemed to waver in confidence. “How can we help?” 

“I’d like a drink.” He’d meant to say that he wasn’t sure what there was to offer. A brief glance around the room seemed to indicate there was a number of selections, but he didn’t want to make any assumptions. 

“Yes, of course,” Becca said. She picked up a beer glass without waiting to hear anything else. She wasn’t even interested in him, she was looking sideways at Olly and the dark-haired woman.

“Uh,” Olly said, “do you need a ride? Off the record, of course, I won’t even ask any questions.” That wasn’t a promise that an ambitious man like Olly could keep. But he seemed to believe it about himself nonetheless. And his companion had already picked up a set of keys off the table as if they had only been waiting.

The bar behind him, all the individual people that had only been taking up space before that moment were shifting, turning, casting glances over their shoulders and the rims of their drinks. They were all  _ staring _ because they  _ knew _ something that mattered. They knew something they thought he would find  _ distressing _ and they wanted to know his thoughts, and his reaction as much as they wanted to be helpful. 

“A ride?” Bill repeated.

Becca had filled the beer glass but she hadn’t handed it to him. She had a good face for bad news; her eagerness to share was tempered by the slope of her concerned eyebrows. “Has nobody told you?”

“Told me?”

“Hardy collapsed,” the dark-haired woman said, “he’s been rushed to the hospital. They said it was serious. Has nobody told you?”

If Bill had any time to think anything at all that didn’t start and begin with  _ that fucking idiot _ , he might have thought how deeply stupid it was that not a single person in all of Broadchurch had any doubts about Bill-and-Hardy. They had convinced themselves so fully that it was true, that they were staring at him with open horror. They were on baited breath, full alert, trying to be simultaneously useful and judgmental. “Fuck,” he hissed under his breath. 

It was only a matter of  _ time _ until Hardy’s stupid choices caught up with him. Realistically, it was less time now than it had been even yesterday. The fact that he was back in the hospital meant he was getting  _ worse _ and of course the bastard  _ knew _ it. He just didn’t  _ care _ . 

“We can give you a ride,” Olly said again.

Accepting the ride would be tantamount to confirming the rumors. There were enough people watching at the moment to be sure that everyone in Broadchurch would know about him dashing off to the hospital to be with Hardy before the sun rose. Bill hadn’t even been at the hospital when his son was born. He has absolutely no reason to accept the ride. 

He didn’t owe Alec Hardy anything.

He wouldn’t be doing either of them any favors, not one single favor at all, by running to his bedside.

“Let me get my coat,” is what he heard himself saying. And all around him, as he strode out the door, he thought he could hear the exhale of a long-held breath.

–

Hardy was not conscious. He wasn’t  _ awake _ . Hell, if he was being honest, he might not even be  _ alive _ . The last thing he remembered was a pain, the cold ground, and the sound of Miller growling threats very close to his face. It didn’t seem like he was still there.

There was no floating over his bed; no sign of shiny white lights beckoning him to his reward. Of course, there were no demons or brimstone or hellfire, either.

No, there was just the impression that life was happening around him. He was  _ somewhere _ , and things were happening. Someone was sitting nearby, someone was fretting. You could always tell when someone was fretting, it made a sound in the air like a buzz that was almost too quiet to hear. It tingled in your ear, down your spine, and warned you off trying to get too close.

“Oh there he is!”

Hardy wasn’t sure about how time was working. He could almost remember it had been quiet a moment ago. He had the impression that he might have been bobbing to the top of a thick soup, reaching upward toward something that felt like consciousness. He wasn’t breaking the surface, but the sounds were coming down.

“Where the hell have you been?” that was Miller. It was always Miller. She was like a rash: she wasn’t pleasant and she was hard to get rid of.

“I only just found out.” That was an American accent. That was  _ Bill _ . His not-really-a-boyfriend Bill, rushing to his sickbed. “Did they say what the prognosis was?”

“The  _ prognosis _ ?” Miller repeated. She was standing now; she got louder when she was standing. “I don’t suppose I need to be telling you. You didn’t see fit to tell any of us about it. I didn’t even think to ask the last time I was here–I thought, I don’t even know what I thought. I didn’t  _ think _ it was severe. I didn’t think it was  _ life-threatening _ . How are you so calm, he almost died?”

“I’m a doctor,” Bill said. 

“That makes it alright?” Miller shouted. “It makes it alright to let everyone, to let  _ me _ go around thinking that he’s just–that he doesn’t eat enough, and he’s tired, and he’s so grouchy because he doesn’t get enough sleep. Who can sleep! There’s a murder! The murder of a boy that I  _ know _ . A boy that I’ve had sleep over at my house! A boy that I’ve known as long as I’ve known my own! I thought he must have cared, but he doesn’t look like  _ shit _ because he’s torn up over the death of a boy! He looks like shit because he’s  _ dying _ !” 

Bill was moving, like a fool, farther into the room and away from the door. The poor bastard must not have had any survival instincts at all. Any man with intelligence would have been backing away from Miller when she was shouting loud enough to follow Alec down into the darkness. He could hear her breathing, that was how furious she was.

“Mrs. Miller,” Bill started to say.

“Ellie!” she shouted.

“Ellie. I don’t know what you’ve found out, but if I had known I would have told you.” That was a very sincere, very believable lie. There wasn’t an ounce of truth in it, but it  _ sounded _ true. Sometimes, most  _ times,  _ people would believe anything that sounded true. “I’m here now,” Bill said.

“You’re here  _ now _ ,” she spat at him. “You tell him from me, when he wakes up, you tell him that he’s an asshole. You tell him that he knows what I’ve got to do and  _ damn _ him for making me be the one to do it.”

Sound was fading out again. He was going back under. He had just enough time to hear Bill promise, “I’ll tell him.”

\--

The fact that Bill did not belong here had not escaped his attention. Bedsides were for loved ones, not for strangers that had been assigned that role by chance. This chair, this modern torture device, was meant for someone so distracted by their distress that they didn’t notice their legs were going numb. The lukewarm coffee clutched between his two hands was meant for mouths that were holding back sobs. The constant  _ light _ , the  _ beeping _ , and the creeping of nurses at all hours of the night were only tolerable to those that were holding their breaths, that were praying through the night that things would be  _ alright _ .

No, this bedside vigil wasn’t made for him. 

It must have been meant for  _ someone _ . There had to be  _ someone _ in all the world that loved Alec Hardy. There had to be a former lover, or a mother, or a sister, or someone that could have been here. Someone that would have cried. Someone that would have  _ prayed.  _

Bill didn’t believe in the power of prayer. No amount of faith in a thankless, unforgiving God was going to save Alec Hardy now. Nothing was going to save the man if he didn’t  _ want _ to be saved. 

Maybe that was the bit that pissed him off. Bill wasn’t a doctor that dealt with death like this. He didn’t often see it as it ate a man from the inside out; he didn’t beg his patients to  _ care  _ the way Alec Hardy’s doctor had probably begged him. He didn’t have to deal with the seizure of fury in his gut, the  _ knowledge _ that things could be  _ done.  _

No, when Bill had been faced with death, it was sudden and  _ horrific _ . It was  _ consuming.  _ There was no time to prepare yourself for the sight of a lifeless newborn. There was no way to break the news to a new father that his baby would be leaving without a mother. Those deaths were  _ brutal _ , and the only mercy that they’d ever offered was that they didn’t  _ linger _ . Bill had never had time to settle in to watch them happening; he’d only ever had time to sort it out afterward.

Some things, you couldn’t sort out. You couldn’t make sense of. He could try for a thousand years, and he would  _ never _ understand why his daughter had to die before she was even born. He’d never understand why he’d insisted to be the one to deliver her. How he had felt standing there with the baby resting in his palms–

Bill had thought he felt nothing.

He never stopped feeling that nothing. He never stopped thinking that some part of him had been torn when he looked at her face. He could barely hold her, he could  _ barely _ stand it. There had been a dozen nurses and a doctor or two, and not a single one of them had tried to take the baby from him. Not even Libby had tried. No, Libby had rolled to the side, with both her arms pressed to her face, crying uncontrollably in the quiet of the room. 

Nobody had moved.

Bill thought of that at Alec Hardy’s bedside. He thought he should have been furious to sit next to a man that was playing chicken with his own death. But it was hard to be  _ angry _ like that, hard to sit in the quiet and listen for the sound of the people that  _ loved _ this man coming down the hall.

–

Hardy woke up to the smell of black-black coffee. It seeped into his face and up his nose. It left a foulness on his tongue that layered over the dryness. He was snarling a complaint before he’d managed to get his eyes open. His limbs were heavy, and  _ tired _ , and his head was stuffed full of ambient noise. 

Except there, the obnoxiously familiar sound of beeping hanging over his head. He could see the bright little lights of monitors when he squinted, and that strained-off-white quality of light unique to hospitals. There was an empty chair by his bedside, and the busy sound of a nurse bustling in to poke and prod and ask questions.

“He’s been waking up for about five minutes,” Bill said.

Hardy turned his head toward the voice, he growled, “no. Why are you here?” There was more he wanted to ask, things about how he’d even gotten there and who had told him. It could have been anyone at this point.

“Be nice,” the nurse said, “he stayed all night.”

Bill sipped his coffee with a disgusted wrinkle of his nose. He said nothing about how he’d stayed, or how he expected gratitude. He knew as well as Hardy that they were caught in a sham. 

“Right,” Hardy said. “Thanks.”

Bill looked over at him without dropping the coffee away from his mouth. It was a good shield, as far as those things went, a good enough excuse not to do any talking. He kept sipping his coffee until the nurse finished with her fussing and turned to leave. “What happened?” he asked as soon as they were alone.

“Uh,” Hardy tried to sit up and managed to do nothing more than slide his head higher on the pillow. He wasn’t ready to be awake. Being awake meant facing the increasingly overwhelming reality that he really was going to kill himself. “I was running.” There was more to the story than that: little details about who he was running after, and who else was there, and none of it mattered.

“Ellie was here,” Bill said. “She said you were an asshole.”

Hardy snorted at that. “Sure she did.”

“She said you would know what she had to do and damn you for making her do it.”

Yes. Miller would tell the Chief Super, and Hardy would be sent to the medical officer, and then he would be out of his office. He wouldn’t be allowed on this case, or any case, until he’d sorted himself out. But that gave him time (just  _ enough _ time). He fought his way up to sitting, or what passed for it these days. 

Bill looked at him without surprise as he set his cup on the windowsill. He said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Is that your professional opinion, or your opinion as my boyfriend?”

Bill’s smile was very, terribly sad. He looked older in the strained light from the window than he had before. His hair had a wave to it that was threatening to be a curl if it wasn’t cared for soon. His cheeks were darkened with a growth of scruff. His voice was forgiving and  _ unforgiving _ in equal measure, “oh, I wouldn’t have you as a boyfriend if you insisted on doing things like this. There’s a lot of cops in the world, it doesn’t have to be  _ you _ .”

But this time, it  _ did _ . Hardy tried to blink but his eyelids were out of sync. His body was too tired to humor him anymore. But he had to get up, he had to finish the case. He had to make this stupid life he had worth living before he bothered worrying about saving it. “I wasn’t always like this.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it,” Bill said. He dipped to the side and picked up the bag of Hardy’s belongings. “We’ll have dinner soon, if you live.” He didn’t throw the bag at Hardy, but pull out his clothes and shake them out. “Come on, I’m already here, I’ll help.”

Hardy considered the offer and the exhaustion of his limbs. He considered the rumors, and then he slid his legs off the bed. His legs were jelly, but they held him. He pulled off the gown and the wires. The sticky little pads stayed behind, and Bill came around the bed to help him peel them off. “You do this a lot?”

“No,” Bill said. He held out the shirt so Hardy could get his arms in and, once it was on him, he started buttoning it up. His attention was intensely focused. He moved without speaking until he’d made it to the second from top button, and then he looked up at Hardy’s face with a shrug. “But, most of the things I usually do make me unhappy. I don’t want to be unhappy anymore.”

Hardy took the pants from bed before Bill could get ideas about putting those on for him. He was capable of getting dressed. “Do you get to make that choice?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Bill said. “I’m trying to figure that out.” He picked up his own jacket off the back of the chair. “So, if you’re not dead in the next twenty four hours, dinner?”

“My treat,” he agreed, “if I’m not dead.”


	4. Chapter 4

The hotel lobby (or what passed for it in this circumstance) was mercifully empty when Bill finally found his way back. It was only Becca, looking as fretfully regretful as she had the night before. She had a face that couldn’t be trusted; a great wealth of concern-and-curiosity that made talking to her about anything as dangerous as fraternizing with a reporter. 

“How is he?” Becca asked.

Alec Hardy was alive, at the moment, and that was about as good as his life was going to get until he finally decided if he was going to try for a treatment that would actually work. But Bill was exhausted; Bill was a raw wound ripped open by too many hours of introspection. 

“Back at work,” Bill said. It was all he intended to say. 

“It’s good that he has someone.” Becca hadn’t moved, but her voice chased after Bill as he kept walking. Maybe she only meant to say it, maybe she meant for him to come back. Maybe she settled for making his step stutter, for making him look over his shoulder at her standing there with her fingers fidgeting together. “He always seemed like he needed somebody. He asked me once–I mean nothing came of it. He’s not a bad looking guy and he’s nice enough, but I found him collapsed in his bathroom once.”

Of course she had; of course Alec had asked the same woman who found him unconscious to stay the night. Loneliness was worse than the threat of death. Bill hadn’t been lonely for very long and it already felt like it was going to eat him alive. He’d had a wealth of attention, and what passed for love, and he’d lost it all. He had no Virginia to stroke her fingers through his hair when they were letting the sweat cool on their skin. He had no Libby to smile at him when he came home, to remind him to fix his tie and tell him that she loved him.

Bill didn’t deserve Libby, he probably never had, but he  _ missed _ her. 

“Are you alright?” Becca asked. “This must be hard for you.”

Oh, this invented, nonsense relationship was hell, but at least Bill would get to leave it behind. Alec had to stay here, he had to live with the fallout. He should have asked if it were better to pretend to care or not. “It is,” Bill said.

Becca nodded.

“I’m going up,” Bill said. He was going to bed and the idea of sleep. 

–

Hardy should have gone back to the station. He’d intended to go back to the station. He’d walked out of the  _ Broadchurch Echo  _ with every intention of going back. 

He reminded himself, again and again, that he only had a matter of time to figure this out. He didn’t have any time to waste. He whispered it into his own head as he crossed the street, he grumbled it under his breath as he walked past the slim crowd of spectators in the hotel bar. He reminded himself with every wretched stair step until he was standing in the hallway outside of Bill’s door.

There was a divine stupidity in standing here. Hardy had never said he wasn’t  _ stupid _ , but he liked to think that his particular sort of stupidity didn’t include showing up uninvited at the door of men who were only playing along. He shouldn’t knock, and he had no intention of doing so. He was just going to stand there for a breath, leaning his head against the doorjamb, eyes closed and daydreaming about what would happen if he had knocked.

Hardy was going to walk away.

The door opened, and Bill was standing on the other side, wearing long white sleep pants and an undershirt that stretched across his body until it was thin as paper. His hand was hanging onto the doorknob, his face was caught up in some unknown agony. “Come in,” he said. “I was having a drink.”

Hardy wanted a drink, but he settled for a nice chair. Bill didn’t even offer him a taste of the liquor he was drinking. He filled a cup with ice and water and left it sitting on the table by Hardy’s chair. “Thanks,” he said.

Bill sat on the end of his rumpled bed, with the full of his attention on Hardy’s exhausted face. He shook his head but he didn’t rehash their past conversations. He said, “how do you think they’ll handle it when we don’t work out?”

“They’ll blame me,” Hardy said. He leaned back into the chair, let his hands fall on the low armrests. “Look at me, what do I have to offer?”

“You’re handsome,” Bill said.

“They call me shitface,” Hardy said.

Bill’s face went shiny and pink, his mouth clenched so he wouldn’t laugh at that. His voice was high and strangled, hiding his amusement, “you have a nice body.”

“I fell into a door earlier.”

“For fucks sake,” Bill hissed. He swallowed his complaints with a mouthful of liquor. “Well, if they knew anything about me they wouldn’t think it was me that was getting the short end of the stick.”

“Why?”

Bill shrugged, he stared at his glass as he spoke: “I’ve been cheating on my wife for years, almost a decade. I– The woman I love just left me for a perfume maker. I might be losing my business because– I don’t have anyone. If they knew anything about me, they would think you deserve someone better.”

Hardy snorted, “they think I let a child murderer go free. I’m the worst cop in Britain.” That was all he meant to say, but he felt scraped open, and invaded. All the things he’d told Olly and Maggie were still aching under his skin. “My wife cheated on me. My daughter barely talks to me.” Those words still hurt too much to say and knowing they were in the hands of reporters made them worse. Hardy didn’t want to  _ talk  _ about it. “Are you–” There was an end to this sentence that didn’t sound quite right. It seemed silly to ask a man with a wife and a mistress if he was gay.

“Interested in men?” Bill prompted when the pause grew too loud. “I have been.”

“Am I your type?” Hardy asked.

Bill snorted. “Am I yours?”

Hardy just shrugged. “I have to get back. I’ve got an appointment with the medical officer in the morning.” He pulled himself out of the chair, and stood still as his body steadied enough to be trustworthy. “Thank you for the water,” he said.

Bill was looking at him, his expression had gone dark, his fist was curled lightly against the inside of his thigh. He was  _ assessing  _ Hardy with a slight frown at the edge of his mouth. Bill’s eyes lingered on his body, traced the wrinkled length of his pant legs and slid slowly up to his face. Bill’s voice was steady, and  _ sure, _ and promising when he said: “you’re my type.”

Hardy’s heart couldn’t  _ stand _ the sound of those words. He couldn’t tolerate the promise behind them. He didn’t even know what to say to them. “I’ve got to go,” he said instead of addressing them at all. If there was an edge of panic to the words, Bill didn’t seem to be offended by it. “I have to figure this case out before tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Bill agreed. He was kind enough to let Hardy go, and not to stand in the doorway watching when he left. 

There was nobody to hear Hardy let out a breath when he reached the stairs, nobody to see him frown at himself, and rub his eyes to clear away the embarrassment. He was alone when he said, “you’re a fucking idiot,” to himself.

\--

Bill had spent the day working on convincing himself that he needed to be packing. Betty had called him the night before to remind him that he did have to come back. She’d sounded tired, and lonely, breathing into the phone about how things were going to get better for everyone.

That was the worst thing about Betty. Life had done its best to beat her down, and she’d just kept getting back up. She pushed and prodded, and shoved when she had to. And sometimes she called him when he didn’t answer the phone to leave long voicemails reminding him of his travel details.

Betty hadn’t said anything about where Virginia was, or how Libby was doing. She’d only mentioned that business was still booming and that their present legal troubles didn’t seem like they were going to stop anyone from coming. (Maybe she meant it as a dirty pun, but there was no humor in her voice.)

Just then, cocooned in the safety of a place that hardly knew him, Bill didn’t want to go back. He didn’t want to be reminded of how much it hurt to know he’d lost Virginia. To cope with the grief and the guilt of what he’d done to Libby. He didn’t want to have to figure out where he was going to live, or how his business was going to continue to operate. 

And oh- _ God _ , what was he going to say to his children? What was he going to do when John looked at him with his sad, old-man eyes and his frowning mouth. The boy wouldn’t ask any questions because he’d never needed anything explained. 

Bill never had to deal with any of it if he never went back.

That’s what he told himself, as he kicked his clothes into piles and he thought about shoving it all into his suitcase. It’s what he told himself while he ate potato chips and lunch meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

But time didn’t stop just because he’d wished it would. The day passed, and he ran out of food, and snacks, and energy. He was all alone, sitting on the end of the bed, watching Alec Hardy’s haggard face on the news announcing that the killer had been apprehended.

There was something to be admired in that sort of determination. Hardy’s stubbornness wasn’t self-sacrifice. It was penance of some sort. He stood in front of the cameras looking as if he’d lost something when any other man in his shoes might have felt a sense of victory. No, Hardy had the eyes of a man who had held a dead child in his hands and wished like hell anyone else would step up and take her away. 

What victory could you take from finding the man who killed a child?

Bill’s suitcase was staring at him from across the room, reminding him that the world waited, and that no matter how fun the distractions had been, Bill didn’t belong here. 

–

Hardy had walked Miller out, or at the very least as far as she would let him. She’d stopped him at the steps, like there was anyone in the hotel that didn’t already know she’d come to see him. Nothing could be gained by arguing with Miller; she needed time and  _ space _ and some sense of control. It didn’t take anything on his part to give it to her.

So he stayed at the end of the hall and watched her head down the stairs. Hardy found himself leaning back against the wall, staring at Bill’s door, thinking that he had absolutely nothing that could even be misinterpreted as dinner. Thinking, the invitation itself had probably been nothing more than an act of kindness. People were always doing that when they found out about his condition; some power bigger than themselves compelled them to be  _ nice _ to him.

The same people that had called him shitface for two months had spent the day looking at him like they were figuring out what sort of arrangement they planned to send to his widow. (He would have a widow, but only because the divorce wasn’t quite finalized.)

There was a big, empty hotel bed waiting for him. There was the intolerable silence of the night to entertain him as he laid in his bed. There was a parade of failures to remind him that no amount of success was going to change how the last one had turned out.

Hardy knocked on Bill’s door with nothing to offer but his exhausted body. Bill answered wearing his stretched-white undershirt and his long-white-sleep pants. He didn’t say a word as he pulled the door open wide enough to let Hardy pass and closed it behind him with a soft click. 

“I was just watching some,” Bill squinted at the TV, “movie, I think.” 

“I didn’t have any food in my room,” Hardy said. He didn’t know where to put his hands. He didn’t know where to keep any of his limbs. He was just a skeleton in a shirt that didn’t used to be this much bigger than him and a pair of pants held on with a very tight belt. 

“I saw the news,” Bill said.

Hardy wished he hadn’t. He wished there was one safe place in this miserable little town. He didn’t want to talk about who had done it, or how, or why. He didn’t want to think about how he’d eaten dinner at the table of the man who killed Danny Latimer. 

“My secretary called,” Bill said instead. His hands were rubbing together like he was nervous, like he was used to having something to fidget with. “She said I had to come back soon, because people keep coming at the office.” He was very proud of the joke.

Hardy snorted. He scratched his fingers into his hair. “I don’t know why I’m here.” But he did; he knew exactly why he was here. He glanced backward at the unmade bed and then over at Bill.

If it were such a disaster, the way Bill’s eyes widened just enough to be afraid would have been funnier. Hardy had quite the habit of horrifying his potential bed partners lately. “Alec…” Bill started to say.

“Forget it,” Hardy said.

“No, wait,” Bill rushed to the side, slid his body between Hardy and the door. “You can stay, if you want to stay. But we can’t,” Bill’s finger wagged between them. He was a professional sex researching struggling to spit out, “have sex.”

Hardy didn’t even want sex. He didn’t want the trouble and the mess of it. He just wanted someone to be there beside him in bed. “I didn’t want sex,” he said. He sagged back onto the bed, sitting just on the edge with his hands laying against the rumpled sheets. “I moved out of my house after I found out my wife was cheating on me. I haven’t–all this started after that.” He motioned at his own chest.

“Touch is important,” Bill said.-

That was what Hardy missed. He missed being touched, he missed being held. He missed the warmth of not being alone. “You don’t have to be kind,” he said, just to say that he had said it.

“I miss it too,” Bill said. He didn’t linger on the thought, or ask for any answers. He just shuffled to turn off all the lamps except the one by the bed. He situated himself on the bed behind Hardy and said, “is there something you like to watch on TV?”

Hardy was an idiot, but he kicked off his shoes and pulled his legs up onto the bed. He laid in a curl on the bed, with his head resting on a folded-over pillow just next to Bill’s thigh. “Anything’s fine,” he said.

Bill’s hand rested on his back lightly, like he wasn’t sure. “Let me know if you change your mind.” 

Someone had taught Bill how to rest his hands on their body. Someone had encouraged him to rub his thumb in circles. It had all the tenderness of a lover, all the familiarity of someone that loved you.

Hardy closed his eyes when Bill’s fingers started threading through his hair. He thought, he couldn’t stay, and he didn’t want to move. 

\--

The morning came on slowly, sneaking in under the curtains to wash up at the foot of the bed. Bill had gotten used to waking up alone; if not completely alone than certainly on his own  _ separate _ side of the bed. He was used to waking up totally and unfortunately.

Bill  _ wasn’t  _ used to the clinging arms of sleep wrapped around him. He wasn’t accustomed to fighting his way to full consciousness. He certainly wasn’t used to being  _ held _ . Not so early in the morning; not without the cooling afterglow of a well-earned orgasm. 

He hadn’t been lying last night; touch  _ was _ important. It had been proven enough times that touch had a power that surpassed expectations. Bill had spent a lifetime convincing himself that he didn’t like to be touched. He’d had a childhood full of all the most violent sort of touching. He’d had a comfortless marriage. He’d had an affair without the pretense of romance.

Bill couldn’t have prepared himself to wake up to the reality of being smothered with touch. He had never had the opportunity to be weighted into place by body laying half-across his. And Alec was laid across him. His head was pillowed on Bill’s chest; his arm was wrapped around Bill’s chest. His leg was thrown carelessly across Bill’s. 

Alec was holding him how a child clutched a stuffed toy. He could feel the man’s heartbeat pressed up against his side; he felt his breathing through his ribs. He felt his  _ breath _ like a tickle through the thin cotton of his shirt. One of Bill’s hands was resting on Alec’s back; the other was cupped around his arm. 

This must have been what Broadchurch thought they were like. It was easy enough to pretend, inside these closed walls, that this is what they were like. With his eyes closed, he could believe they were lovers. Any minute now, Alec would wake up and they would whisper good morning to one another. They’d luxuriate in the nearness until responsibility drove them out of bed.

Maybe they’d kiss with minty fresh breath when they met in the kitchen. Bill would drink black coffee and read the paper; Alec drank tea and frowned into the well-stocked fridge. They’d argue about breakfast, and the necessity of it, griping that they really should put more effort into it. But neither of them were morning people, and neither of them cared.

Bill would say he could stand to lose a few pounds; Alec would roll his eyes at that but they wouldn’t start in about it again.

They’d advise one another about ties, make plans about dinner that they might not get to keep. Dinner was never a set thing; there were too many variables to keep them to any schedule. 

They would say  _ I love you _ at the door, as they were picking up their wallets and car keys. They’d kiss again there, grimacing about the taste of coffee and tea mixing together. 

Yes, it was a lovely life they could have had together. All except for how Bill didn’t belong in Broadchurch and Alec didn’t belong in America. Except for how they knew nothing about one another.

“You mumble to yourself,” Alec said against his chest. It was the sound of a man who didn’t want to be awake. His limbs shifted a little as he stretched without pulling away. “Just a few more minutes and I’ll get out of your bed.” But he was hardly awake enough to keep that promise.

“Stay as long as you like,” Bill said.

–

Hardy woke up, properly and fully woke up, burrowed into the warm space next to Bill Master’s body. They had shifted from how he remembered it being the last time he’d gotten close to consciousness. Bill was leaning back against the headboard now, wearing his reading glasses, and squinting at his phone. His hand was resting on Hardy’s back still with his absent thumb rubbing up and down again how it always seemed to do. 

The curtains had been opened enough to let a sliver of daylight into the dreary gray room. The glowing red numbers on the clock by the bed indicated it was well past ten in the morning. Hardy might have been ashamed of himself if he had been awake enough to manage it. His body was drunk on sleep; his brain was made of lukewarm mush.

“Have you been up for long?” Hardy asked. He wasn’t ready to move yet. His arms were pulled up against his chest and pressed against Bill’s thigh. He was warm and comfortable.

“A couple of hours.”

Once he was fully awake, that information might become embarrassing. He might think that he should have been more courteous in plotting his escape. Maybe he wouldn’t; maybe Hardy would just be grateful for the time he’d been given. 

“So,” Bill said. He set his phone on the bedside table and reached up to pull his glasses off. “I’m leaving tomorrow. Should we stage a break up?”

“No,” Hardy rolled away so he could stretch fully. “Let them think whatever they want. I’ve never even confirmed we were together.” 

Bill was looking at him, not at any particular part of him, just  _ looking  _ like he couldn’t find anything he wanted to focus on. His hands were back to resting in his own lap and his expression was as soft as it had ever been. “You really should listen to your doctors, Alec.”

Hardy scoffed as he kicked himself free from the blankets. He got his feet on the floor before he answered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It has to be talked about,” Bill said.

“Yes,” Hardy conceded, “and it  _ has _ been. But not  _ here.  _ Not with  _ you _ .” He hadn’t meant to make the words sound so sharp; he hadn’t meant to be so angry. It happened when things felt too close to him; when they caught him under the ribs like this.

Bill was a man who liked a good fight. You could see it in the flex of muscle in his arms, and the weight of his shoulders. His scowl was fearsome because it had  _ intent _ behind him. But it passed quickly over his face, and it broke with a sigh of surrender. “Fine,” he said, “but you owe me a meal. It’s too late for breakfast.”

Hardy was barely standing. He was wearing yesterday’s clothes that he’d  _ slept  _ in. He hadn’t even made it to a bathroom yet. “I didn’t think that was serious.”

“Well it was,” Bill said. “We can meet in the lobby in a half an hour. You must know somewhere around here that has a good lunch.”

“Not really,” Hardy said. He scratched his fingers through his hair, and looked over his shoulder toward the window. “I can figure something out. A half an hour?” he repeated. “I’ve got to check on Miller. Give me an hour.” (Maybe two, depending on how that conversation went.)

Bill nodded, “fine. I’ll meet you in an hour.”

\--

Alec Hardy did not appear to own any other clothes. He had shown up, as promised, approximately an hour after he’d left Bill’s room. His hair was slick and damp, his beard (or what must have been meant to become a proper beard) was neater and he had the slightest odor of refreshed antiperspirant. It was just the clothes that hadn’t changed. 

“Is your partner okay?” Bill asked.

“I don’t think you can be okay in her situation,” Alec looked down at his own skinny body, rested his hand over the buttons of his shirt and then dropped his hand again, “I changed my shirt.”

If Bill stared at the shirt, if he  _ really _ looked at it, he could almost tell it was a different shirt. It was just that it was the same blue and the differences were almost imperceptible. “Of course,” he said when he couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Shall we?” 

He meant for Alec to go first, and he’d intended to open the door for him but Alec must have meant the same thing because they were both standing there with their hands vaguely raised toward the exit and neither of them moving. Becca was, thankfully, in the bar and unable to watch the pair of them look at each other like idiots. 

“I’ll go,” Alec said as if he barely understood the words as they happened, “I’ll lead.”

Bill nodded, “yes, good.”

It still took a matter of seconds before the successfully started putting the plan into motion. Alec was confused about his own offer (or it looked like he was) just before he took a step forward. He pulled the door open himself and held it just long enough for Bill to get his hand on it. The confusion didn’t stop once they got outside.

Alec stood there, hands hanging at his sides like he suddenly had no idea where to put them, while he squinted down the street. The  _ Broadchurch Echo  _ was as busy as it had ever been. A great swell of people were milling around on the sidewalk in front of it. “We, uh,” Alec said. He was glaring at the crowd.

“Maybe we could get something to go,” Bill suggested, “I’ve heard there’s very nice views from the cliffs.”

“I’ve heard that too,” said the man who lived in Broadchurch. Maybe Alec wasn’t the sort of person to go looking for a view or perhaps he’d never had the occasion. Whatever the reason, he made a statement look more like a question in the very same way he made taking a step forward look like a step backward. Alec was leading them down the street but it still felt like neither of them knew where they were going to end up. “What, uh–” Alec looked sideways at him, “what do you like to eat?”

“Whatever you like,” Bill said.

Alec frowned at him. It made his whole face scrunch up, as intimidating as a toddler on the verge of a fit. 

They had come to a stop on the sidewalk, standing almost in front of a shop that sold reliable sandwiches and fries. (At least in Bill’s very limited experience.) Bill had slid his hands into his pants pockets and it added a delightful sensation of shameless amusement at the moment.

Alec was well and truly stumped. He was standing there squinting at Bill as if he’d never seen a human before. His hands were pressed against his hips as his tongue licked at his lips. “No preferences?”

“Do you eat?” Bill asked. (He’d said the words as a joke but as soon as he’d said them a worry formed in the pit of his stomach. The realization that his jest might be closer to the truth than he liked.) “You must eat.”

“Of course I eat,” Alec snapped at him. “I’m  _ human _ . Why does nobody think I eat?”

Bill let the slow drag of his stare from Alec’s thin, bony shoulders to his stork legs convey the explanation. “Then what’s the trouble?” Bill asked.

“I want to make sure there’s something you’d like,” Alec said.

“That’s very sweet of you.”

Alec scoffed at the words. They must have reached his limit to make attempts because he seemed exhausted. Bill could understand the way that felt; friendships and relationships had never come to him easily. He had either let them go by him without making an attempt or he had simply dragged the other person into his life and kept them there. 

Except Betty. Betty had been a means to an end, and then she had been an annoyance but she had insinuated herself into his practice and then his life and she refused to be gotten rid of. At the end of all his stupid mistakes, Betty had been the only one left that could bear to look at him. 

“Come on,” Alec said before any further, painful attempts to hold a conversation could be made. He led them into the sandwich shop, even being so kind as to hold the door for him. 

Unfortunately, there were people in the shop. Even more unfortunately, there were people who had heard the rumors, that had helped spread them around. Bill looked at Alec just to watch his face as he realized what they’d walked into. The poor bastard had to put up with these same faces tomorrow. 

“Should we go?” Bill asked.

“It’ll be the same anywhere.”

–

Bill settled onto the bench next to him with all the fluttery motion of a bird ruffling its feathers. There was the matter of arranging his jacket, and his trousers and his shirt front before he finally stopped moving long enough to take an interest in the sack of food between them. Bill wasn’t even looking at Hardy when he spoke:

“I’m sorry. I should have been more considerate.”

Hardy was prepared to object from habit alone; he didn’t need anyone to be  _ considerate _ of his condition. He didn’t want to be pampered; he didn’t want  _ reasonable adjustments _ to be made. But, he was out of breath just from walking here. There was a quiver of weakness underneath his skin that made even the most mundane objection seem defeated. 

“I like the view,” Hardy said.

“It is very nice,” Bill agreed. He pulled a handful of napkins out of the sack and divided them between them. “We don’t know one another,” wasn’t at all what Hardy was expecting the man to say. “There’s a chance that we might never meet again, or even speak again, after today. I hardly know anything about you. I’m  _ sure _ there must be plenty of professionals that have been telling you the same thing already.”

“Please don’t,” Hardy started to say. He might have finished saying it too if not for how severely Bill frowned at him. If not for how the man put a hand up to hush him before he could continue.

“You have to take care of yourself,” Bill said.

Hardy rolled his eyes. “I have been. Look at me,” he motioned at his own body, at his pitiful wrinkled shirt. At the pants he’d worn the day before and slept in. At his belt pulled another notch tighter. “Still alive.”

“Your quality of life could  _ significantly _ improve.”

“Not in Broadchurch,” Hardy said. He squinted out at the sun glinting off the water. The wind felt like sand, and  _ salt.  _ It ripped holes through you if you stayed too long, and left you feel damp and cold. 

“You’d be able to resume normal life activities, like brisk walks in the morning.”

“I prefer slow ones.”

Bill was grinding his teeth. His jaw was tense, his hands were coiling up into fists in his lap. He was  _ staring _ at Hardy like he’d never met a man that he disliked more. And when it seemed like he was going to abandon the conversation, he said: 

“We could have had sex,” as if that had ever been a real possibility. “I’m here as a punishment. I’ve been banished by my secretary. My wife is probably burning my belongings in the fireplace. My mistress is getting married to another man. We could have had sex; we could both of benefited from it.”

Hardy was searching for some manner of response.

Bill pulled the sandwiches out of the bag and slapped one into Hardy’s lax, open hand. “Look at you, all I did was mention the word and it looks like you’re going to fall off the bench.”

“You–” Hardy sputtered, “you can’t just– You can’t just  _ say _ that. This is my  _ heart _ , I could  _ die  _ and you’re talking about  _ sex _ .”

“I did say you were my type,” Bill said. He didn’t seem very concerned at all about how they didn’t know one another. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in watching Hardy glare at him. No, Bill was unfolding the paper around his sandwich like he could just  _ eat _ . 

“That’s a compliment coming from a sex researcher. I bet you’ve seen every type there is.”

Bill shrugged, “most of them, yes.”

Hardy frowned at the grass around his feet. He frowned at his shoes. He frowned until he worked out what he wanted to say. By the time he looked up Bill was already chewing his second bite. 

“I haven’t had sex in years,” he said. “I probably don’t even remember how.”

Bill snorted at that.

Hardy pulled his sandwich out of the bag and tucked the sack under his thigh. He was barely hungry enough to tolerate eating; he unwrapped the sandwich anyway. “My wife cheated on me.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“So I won’t say that I’m sorry your wife is burning your belongings. You deserve to have them burnt.” He took a bite of his sandwich.

Bill sighed next to him; he didn’t protest at all. He just nodded his head, “I know.”

“Still,” Hardy said after a pause, “it hurts to have your heart broken.”

Bill’s smile was agony. He turned his head to look at Hardy just for a moment, and then out again at the horizon. “Yes, it does.”

The conversation faded then, and they sat in silence, watching the waves and the sun.


	5. Chapter 5

Bill’s travels brought him back to the office for lack of a better place to go. The office was, at the  _ very _ least, more familiar to him than another hotel room. He knew all the turns of this building; all the sounds it made as it settled to sleep. He knew where they kept the tea and sugar. There were spare sheets in a cabinet by the exam rooms and a couch in the employee lounge that was long enough to stretch out on. It wasn’t the same as being  _ home,  _ but it was as close as he had for now.

Betty woke him in the morning. She held out an extra cup of coffee to accompany the little sack of donuts she’d dropped on the coffee table in front of him. “Have a nice trip?” she asked.

No. The way home had been worse than the way out. Or, maybe that was just knowing what he was coming back to. Bill sat up with a groan, and scrubbed his gritty eyes with his finger and thumb. “The best,” he said.

Betty cocked an eyebrow up at that statement. She handed him the coffee before she invited herself to sit next to him. There was a couch as long as a full grown man to choose from but she dropped into place so close to his side their elbows were kissing. “Your ex called while you were gone,” she said.

“Which one?” Bill asked.

Betty snorted before she could answer. “Your soon to be ex-wife called to say that she’d donated all your clothes to the local thrift shop. She said that she was packing up, quote ‘your other shit’ unquote and you had three days to come get it.”

Well, all things considered that was very charitable of Libby.

“How long ago was that?”

“Relax boss,” Betty said. She patted him on the leg with an awkward slap of her palm and then thought better of it. “Helen and I moved your shit into our guest room for the time being. Now that’s supposed to be the nursery when you’re done getting distracted by your personal crises so it can’t stay there but at least you’re not going to have to buy it back, you know.”

Bill nodded along. “Well, thank you Betty.”

They were quiet for a few blessed minutes, sipping their coffee before the day really got started. Bill was working himself up to feeling like he could manage it from here on. (He was thinking how very much he must look like Alec Hardy right now, wearing the same wrinkled clothes he’d been wearing for days.) 

Betty leaned her head against his shoulder, wormed her arm under his and said, “so, did you meet any nice guys over there?”

“Oh for  _ Christ’s  _ sake. How did you find out?”

“I have an alert for any news articles that feature your name,” Betty said. She sat up straight again because he’d jerked to the side. Her smile was just as brilliantly pleased as he had imagined it would be. “I like to know what’s coming at me, you know? It helps me keep an accurate estimate of the death threats that we’re going to get in the mail.” 

“They really put it in the  _ news _ ?”

“Oh,” Betty pulled her phone out of her pocket, “they put it in a lot of the news. You think you can go over there and hook up with the worst cop in Britain and nobody’d notice?” She pulled up an article with a stupid title and a grainy, unforgiving photo of Alec Hardy. “Not really a looker, but what do I know?”

“He does look terrible,” Bill agreed.

“I didn’t know you had homosexual leanings,” Betty said. She pronounced every syllable of the words separately, dragging the world homosexual out as long as she could. She’d been teasing him about it since the beginning. Bill was bad at interactions, and worse at surprises, and he just hadn’t been prepared to be uncomfortable using the word until he’d heard himself saying it. 

He was over that now, but Betty had known him since the start, and she  _ never _ let him forget it. 

“I prefer women,” Bill said, “but I think every man has at least  _ thought _ about it. Most have probably experimented.”

“Right,” Betty said. She tucked the phone back into her pocket. “So how was the worst cop in Britian? Does he make up in sex what he lacks in investigative prowess?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bill said. 

“Oh come on.”

“I really wouldn’t know. The town made it up. We never even kissed.”

Betty’s face was pink with laughing as she got back up to her feet. “If that’s the story we’re telling. Come on, boss. Eat your breakfast, we’ve got a full schedule today.”

–

It was a week (according to his phone) before he saw Ellie again. Hardy hadn’t had any notion of seeing her again or he might have done a better job at trying to keep his hotel room tidy. It was a constant wonder to him that he could make such a mess with so little. But there were what few clothes he’d brought with him, dropped where they lay. There was a variety of takeout boxes, and snack bags and other debris all stacked up along the way to the trash.

Ellie looked the same as she’d ever been on the outside. Maybe her face was a little more wan, maybe there was a bit less of a twinkle in her eye, but you couldn’t tell that if you didn’t look for it. “Christ,” she said as soon as she saw him, “what have you been doing?”

Sometimes, more than anything else, Ellie Miller was a mother. 

“Resting,” Hardy said. It sounded better than the more true alternatives. He was saving up his energy to decide what he was going to do next. There was the matter of staying in Broadchurch or not. There was a growing list of medical appointments waiting for him. There was a need to find a more permanent living arrangement. 

Ellie stood just inside his room scowling at the state of his belongings. She was shaking her head, working around her own agony to come up with something worth saying. “I hardly have room to say anything. Look at the pair of us, messed up over men that don’t deserve our time.” 

One day, Hardy was going to have to tell her the truth. “How’re the boys?” he asked.

“How do you think they are?” she asked. Nobody was going to blame her for being sharp. 

Hardy was the last man who would condemn someone for being unfriendly. He didn’t even know what to say now. Or if he should close the door; if there was something he needed to offer her. Tea? (He didn’t even have any.)

“I’ve just come to– I don’t know why I’m here. I just needed to take a walk and I ended up here. How are you? Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” Hardy said.

Ellie looked significantly toward the pile of his unwashed clothes spread out along the foot of the bed. Then she just sighed, and gripped her elbows like she was trying to contain herself in a smaller space. “I’ve put in for a transfer.” Of course she had. 

“If you think that’s best.”

Ellie coughed a laugh. She didn’t address his poor attempt at conversation, she just sighed. “Take care of yourself, Alec.  _ Really _ take care of yourself. I don’t want to hear on the news about you dying.”

Well, that made two of them. “I will,” he said. “You take care of yourself too.”

“Right,” Ellie said. She slid back out through the door he was still holding open with a nod. “Good bye.”

\--

Apartment hunting had proven to be an exhausting, endless,  _ tedious _ process. The most important thing Bill had learned from it was that despite the existence of a home with his name on the deed, he hadn’t been involved in the search for it. If he concentrated properly, he could remember Libby with a spread of printouts and flyers at the dinner table. He remembered her voice caught in a wave of anxiety; remembered how trivial her worries had seemed. 

Libby had been trying to find a home to raise a family in. Bill had only needed a house in a respectable neighborhood with a well-maintained yard. Libby had worried about bedrooms, and bathtubs and windows. Bill had just wanted a place to park his car.

Bill was an ignorant man, standing alone in an empty apartment, half-listening to the agent tell him about how new the kitchen was. It hit him low in the gut, the growing realization that he was well-and-truly alone. That his exile had not been an aberration but the start of a new normal. He was  _ here _ to select a place to live and he would have to make a home out of these empty rooms. 

If looking for a home to put things in was hell, he couldn’t imagine what shopping for the things to furnish the home would be like.

Bill didn’t even own a god damn pan. Bill had barely ever cooked a meal in his life. 

Bill knew how to do laundry  _ in theory _ . He’d done it when he was a stupid boy sent away to boarding school and an even bigger idiot in college. He couldn’t remember now what half the symbols on the clothes meant.

He didn’t own a towel. He couldn’t even shower.

“Dr. Masters?” the lovely woman said from a safe distance.

Bill was clenching his fists, grinding his teeth, staring at the perfectly clean carpeted floors. He was trying to work through the building panic and remind himself that he was  _ capable _ . It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it; it was that he  _ had _ to. He’d destroyed the home he’d had for the chance to love someone. (Had he? Had he loved Virginia? He thought he had; it felt like he had.) “Yes,” he said softly.

“Did you want a moment?”

No. A moment meant that reality had to settle around him. A moment meant that he had to accept things as they were. A moment meant he really couldn’t continue to sleep in his office; that he couldn’t imagine that things were temporary. He was truly alone; he had to start over at the start again.

(And it was cruel, how desperately he wanted to talk to Libby. It was like being stabbed in the stomach. It  _ hurt _ .) 

“You said there was a two bedroom model?” he asked.

“Yes. Two and three bedroom models are available.”

Bill nodded, “I have kids.” He had three kids, and no reason to think that their Mother would ever let him see them again.

The woman smiled. “Of course. Well, the basics are the same in all three models. Let me check the availability on the two and three bedrooms.”

“Thank you,” Bill said. He forced his hands to loosen, and his shoulders to relax. He reminded himself that he’d done this to himself; that he deserved it. He reminded himself that it could be worse. He could buy furniture and learn how to do laundry. 

–

Hardy had not made the decision to stay in Broadchurch. He hadn’t made any decisions at all, and still he’d ended up with a tiny cottage by the water. That was the sort of thing that came of agreeing to avoid a decision. Still, Hardy had signed his name on the contract and he was the proud, temporary owner of said cottage and the furnishings within.

Agreeing to things was only going to take Hardy so far. He couldn’t agree himself into a life that he wanted to live. He hadn’t even seen the right doctor to agree that he might want to save his own life. He was still teetering between the will to live and the likelihood that he  _ would _ live.

It wasn’t that Hardy didn’t have things to live for. He had a daughter that he loved very much. He had a career (damaged though it was by the events of Sandbrook). 

He had this awful little town full of nosy little people, like the checkout girl at the gas station that shook her head when she saw him. She was fond of saying, “How are you doing?” 

Hardy had heard her say it often enough when he was just trying to get a quick drink or a light snack to know that the way she said it  _ to him _ was different from the way she said it to anyone else. Those other lucky bastards got the usual: a blank sort of repetitious statement. April (that was her name) wasn’t asking how they were; she was repeating a catch phrase. But she always looked at him with sloping eyebrows and genuine  _ worry _ and when she spoke to him it was  _ soothing _ .

“Fine,” Hardy said, again and again and again.

If he had to guess why he got a bit of extra attention, he would say that the town (misguided though it was) was offended to know that he was abandoned by his doctor boyfriend during his critical illness. Maybe they were upset to know that he was ill. (Even if they didn’t know how ill.) Maybe they thought he’d had his heart broken. 

Hardy even had a job if he wanted one. He wasn’t well enough to be a detective but he was well enough to do  _ something _ , provided he could prove that he was seeking medical care.

There were a dozen little things to live for, to  _ choose _ to live for. 

And there was the quiet of his empty cottage, with just the sound of his breathing and the answering sway of the water not so far from his front door. There was a blanket of silence as heavy as a collapsing house, suffocating him with isolation.

Hardy hadn’t meant to program Bill’s number into his phone, but it felt like it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to have a doctor he could call. He certainly hadn’t meant to pull the number up, to open a text message that he wasn’t even certain he wanted to send. It was just long after midnight, in the quiet dark, and it had been days since he’d slept properly. Hardy was a real idiot typing words into his little glowing phone screen.

** _I believe the girl at the gas station thinks you’re an asshole_ ** **.**

Hardy had sent the message before he could change his mind about it. He’d regretted it almost as soon as they went through. It made him lurch forward, so he was sitting up in bed frowning at the screen. He was still fumbling, trying to figure out how to cancel the text when his phone buzzed in his hands.

Bill said:  ** _Alec?_ **

Hardy could leave it at that, he could pretend like it hadn’t been his thumbs that made those words. He could have let Bill think someone was sending him random messages. But, he leaned back into his pillows, holding the phone over his face as he typed out a response:

** _Yes, sorry. Alec Hardy._ **

The response came a moment later: **_The girl at the gas station sounds very wise. I feel more like an asshole every day._** With a small pause before Bill added: **_How are you_****?**

The answer to that question was far too complicated. Hardy couldn’t send a frown and a shrug through his phone so he said, ** _ Not sleeping. You?_ **

** _Also not sleeping but its not that late for me. _ **

** _You should sleep, Alec_ **

There were many things that Hardy  _ should _ do.  ** _Did you rescue your things from fire?_ **

** _My assistant saved them. I’m just moving into an apartment. I don’t even have a mattress to sleep on yet. Just a pile of boxes of the things my wife decided I could keep_ **

Hardy snorted at that.  ** _I’ve just moved into a cottage. It came with furniture_ **

** _You are smarter than me._ **

Hardy had nothing to say to that. He couldn’t think of anything clever, and he couldn’t think of anything generic enough. He stared at the screen searching for any sort of words that could work as a response. 

Bill said:  ** _I hope you’ve fallen asleep. When you wake up, you’ll have to tell me how Broadchurch is handling our separation_ **

Hardy smiled, and just for that one moment, looking at the dim glow of his phone screen, it didn’t hurt at all.

\--

The established rhythm of Bill’s life had been utterly destroyed; developing a new sense of normal was continuously hindered by the fact that Bill had (apparently) never appreciated the women in his life. It had felt like he appreciated them when he had them, but the disaster that his personal and professional life had become proved otherwise.

It was embarrassing to be an adult that had to re-learn how to do basic tasks like shop for groceries, pay bills and clean his bathroom. The necessity of putting on a polite, interested,  _ personable  _ professional face  _ exhausted _ him. The first reason he had ever gone looking for an assistant was to relieve him of the emotional labor of interacting with his patients on a social level.

Bill was interested in the science; the people were just a means to that end.

But even as tired as he was at the end of the day, sitting on his single dining room chair, staring at the lackluster TV dinner he’d picked up on his way home, Bill could handle all of those things. He was smart, and capable, and  _ resilient _ . (That’s what his Mother said when she tried to make it sound like he’d developed super powers from being beaten by his father. You’re made of  _ tougher _ stuff, she’d say. You can  _ withstand _ anything. Bill couldn’t withstand  _ anything _ but he’d gotten more than enough practice  _ withstanding _ his father’s fists.)

The unbearable thing was  _ remembering _ about his children. It hit him low in the gut, now and again, when the room around him got quiet. He  _ remembered _ that he had children. He  _ remembered _ that he missed them. It was like remembering an appointment at the last second, it gripped your whole body in a wave of warmth that you’d ever forgotten something  _ important _ . Bill had been a terrible husband, a terrible lover, and a terrible father.

All the evidence he needed was the fact that he was capable of  _ forgetting _ his children. That he had to  _ remember _ them in quiet spaces. Every time it overcame him, he soothed himself by thinking that he’d fix it. He thought he still had time. He thought, certainly, tomorrow he was going to go and see Libby, or a lawyer, and he was going to work it out.

Every day ended the same: Bill, a lukewarm TV dinner, and the realization that he’d forgotten his children again.

Bill never went to see Libby; she came to his office so early in the morning that she was there before he arrived. She was  _ beautiful _ , the way she always had been, and  _ furious _ still. With her back as straight as a steel beam and her hands folded together in her lap, she sat on the little couch in his office  _ waiting _ for him.

“Libby,” he said.

“Don’t,” was her response, as sharp as a knife. “I always hated it when you put on that voice. I knew you were lying to whoever you were talking to, and you  _ always _ used that voice on me.”

Bill couldn’t have defended himself even if he’d been given the time to.

“I’ve hired a lawyer,” Libby said. 

“Good.”

Libby’s frown was so tight it might as well shredded her lips across her teeth. She shifted her hands on her lap and tried again, “I don’t want the house. I’ve decided that I don’t want to live here anymore. I’ve told the lawyer the only thing that I want from you is the children. Let’s be honest,” and Libby  _ would _ be honest, as brilliant and hurtfully honest as she could be, “you never wanted them anyway.”

Bill hadn’t even set his briefcase down. It bumped against his leg when his arms twitched, and he wasn’t certain if he meant to cross his arms or raise his fists at the statement. He couldn’t even work out if he were insulted to be thought so little of, or offended at the implication he would just let his children go. (That was the loudest thought: they were  _ his _ children.) 

“I don’t think we should do anything rash,” Bill said.

“It’s not rash,” Libby said. “I don’t want your house. I don’t want your money. I don’t want  _ anything _ from you. I  _ only _ want my children.”

“They’re  _ our _ children, Libby.”

Libby snorted at that. She stood up with a jerk of annoyance. Her hands were fretting in front of her and then smoothing down the length of her skirt in the next moment. She looked at him like he was a bug. “You never even held them as babies, Bill. You weren’t at half their birthday parties. I had Johnny  _ alone _ . Don’t stand there acting like you’ve ever cared about  _ my _ children.”

“I  _ have _ cared.”

“You’ve  _ pretended _ to care,” Libby corrected. “That’s fine. I knew what you were when I decided to get pregnant. Even if I didn’t know before Johnny was born, I  _ knew _ before Jenny.”

“I’m not giving up my children,  _ Libby _ .”

Libby looked at him with pity. She shook her head when words failed her, and ran her tongue over her pink lips. “Then I’ll see you in court.” 

Bill didn’t have time to say another word before Libby walked out. He was left standing there, still holding his briefcase, trying to figure out what had happened and what he could possibly do about it. (And the answer was, he had happened and there was nothing to do about it.)

–

** _Would you ever forgive your wife?_ **

Bill had sent the message a full day ago and Hardy had spent every moment thinking about the answer. The cheapest, easiest answer was to say that he had forgiven her. She had said that she was sorry, she had said that she wished things would have been different, and he had said he forgave her.

Hardy hadn’t meant it though. He’d been keeping the peace. He’d been doing what was best for his daughter. (Whatever that meant.) 

Tess had wounded him. The severity of the wound couldn’t be measured because it could  _ not _ be separated from the consequences of her selfish betrayal. Maybe he  _ could _ have forgiven her for fucking another man; maybe he could have gotten over being lied to. Maybe it wouldn’t have even mattered, not really, that she’d betrayed him.

What man in all the world could say that he’d never thought about being unfaithful. Hardy had been the receiver of appreciative glances in the past; he’d had opportunities to take advantage of discreet indiscretions. And he’d thought about it in earnest. He’d built fantasies out of the  _ idea _ that he didn’t have to be faithful to his wife as long as he could keep secrets.

But he hadn’t done it.

No, the trouble with Tess fucking another man behind his back wasn’t that she had taken her clothes off and spread her legs. It was that a murderer had gotten away. A little girl couldn’t have  _ justice _ for the atrocities committed against her because his wife had been too cock-hungry to do her job properly.

Tess had let him take the blame. She’d sat there with tears in her eyes, telling him how sorry she was about everything, but she let him take the blame. She saved her career and her reputation. She protected herself by agreeing that it was meant to protect their daughter.

Hardy lost everything because Tess took her clothes off with another man. It was a hard thing to forgive but it was an easy thing to turn bitter in the pit of your stomach. If he had to choose if he wanted to hate his wife until the day he died, he simply didn’t have the stomach for it. 

** _Yes_ ** , was all the answer he sent back.

Bill’s response was immediate:  ** _Have you ever purchased a couch?_ **

** _I have. Are these two things related somehow?_ **

** _I need somewhere to sit that isn’t my bed or the dining chair._ **

The limited things that Hardy knew about Bill should not have made the statement as surprising as it was.  ** _Wait, have you never purchased a couch?_ **

** _No. Well, I have paid for a couch but I haven’t picked it out. Libby always chose the furniture, and Virginia decorated the office._ **

** _You didn’t help?_ **

**_I didn’t see the need to._** Of course Bill had not seen the need to. Why should a man worry about things when he had women to do it for him?

** _It was your home and your office._ **

**_Yes._** If Bill had any sense of shame, he must have been staring at his phone working out how to explain himself. **_I trusted that it would be taken care of. Libby and Virginia both knew my preferences and I paid. We all did our part._**

** _Have you considered that it is not the 1950s and that you are an asshole, Bill Masters?_ **

** _That thought does occur to me frequently, yes. _ **

Hardy wasn’t smiling at his phone because he was  _ happy _ . It didn’t feel like joy, but it felt like  _ something _ . He was curled forward in bed, smiling at his phone screen with a disbelieving sort of laugh caught in his throat.  ** _Are you looking at the couches now?_ **

** _Yes._ **

** _Are you alone?_ **

** _Yes_ ** _ .  _ (Of course he was. Bill must have run out of women he hadn’t already pissed off.)

** _Tell me about them._ **

** _Why?_ **

**_It will help you decide which one you like the best. If you don’t like it you’re not going to waste time texting about them._** Hardy leaned back into his pillows, with the phone held over his face. 

** _Oh. That’s clever._ **

They wasted time like that, Hardy reading Bill’s sarcastic descriptions of couches and the salesperson. They narrowed the choices down to two possible contenders. Bill sent him pictures, and Hardy offered advice until he was too tired to stay awake a moment longer. He thought he should have told Bill that he was going to pass out at any moment, and not to worry (he was still alive) but he woke up the next morning with the phone laying next to his face. 

The last text he got from Bill said:  ** _Good night, Alec. I hope you sleep well._ **


	6. Chapter 6

The distant sound of rapid stomping was so audible even through the walls that Bill could bob his head along with the footfalls. He was working around to a sense of shame for his behavior and landing somewhere near to an almost-forgotten sense of annoyance. 

It wasn’t Bill’s fault that people were sensitive. It wasn’t his fault that sex was a touchy subject; that he made people uncomfortable. (Virginia had said to him, once, that people made him uncomfortable and he had no choice but to return the favor.) Bill couldn’t change  _ everything  _ about himself just to satisfy the world.

He was already a distant image of his former self. He’d given up drinking, and having sex, and any hope that things could ever be normal again. He’d started watching evening TV for lack of anything better to do.

Somewhere in the world, Virginia would have been  _ dying _ to know that Bill Masters was, in fact, capable of watching a sitcom if you left him alone long enough. On the weekends, when he couldn’t pretend there was any need to do work, he found himself sitting like a sack of potatoes on his couch, watching reruns of old shows.

No, Bill could adjust to accommodate all the things he’d done wrong. He could rearrange his own expectations to make room for his new reality. What he wasn’t willing to do, regardless of the lecture that Betty would soon be delivering, was change the fundamental awfulness that made him who he was.

His awfulness had gotten him this far in life. 

Still, he had time now that his appointment had stormed out in a great huff. He relaxed back into his chair and pulled his phone out of his pocket. (He thought, if he were really going to do it, he should finally start calling around for lawyers.) The conversation with Alec was still open, still waiting for Bill to initiate today’s topic.

**_Have they stopped giving you looks?_**

There’s another thing Virginia wouldn’t have been able to understand: how Bill had gone all these years without even trying to make a friend and now he was having all-day text conversations with a man from  _ Broadchurch _ . 

** _If you’re asking if they have gotten over how you’ve left me alone on my deathbed, the answer appears to be that they will never get over it._ **

Bill snorted at that.  ** _I did tell you that I couldn’t be with a man who refused to care for himself._ **

Betty announced her arrival with a sigh. She was lingering in the doorway, fingers tapping on the wood as she worked out what on earth she intended to say. “Well, seeing how you’ve got some time, I think we really should finally have that conversation about how this thing is going to go.”

“Which thing?” Bill asked.

“The thing where you get my girlfriend knocked up,” Betty said.

Bill frowned at the phone, and the floating dots that indicated an answer would eventually appear. He slipped it back into his pocket so he could concentrate on Betty.

She was poised for a fight, as tense as a high-strung cat, waiting to know if she was going to have to claw his eyes out. There had been reasons, (good ones), that he’d told her it wasn’t a good idea before. If he concentrated he might even remember the nonsense he’d told himself, but they seemed stupid now. 

“Do you have a sperm donor?”

Betty frowned at him all the harder, with her eyes narrowing as she slid inward from the doorway to get a better look at him. She took a seat in the chair that was left empty by his previous client. Her hands folded on top of the desk, “you’re really going to do it?”

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

“You seemed to think there was.”

Bill shrugged. 

Betty leaned back into the chair opposite him. Her fingertips were pressed against the chair arms, her expression was caught in the same heightened suspicion. 

“I was wrong,” Bill said. “Whatever I said, it was wrong. I’d be happy to help. Put uh–”

“Helen,” Betty prompted.

“Helen, on the schedule. We’ll have to start at the beginning, but if she doesn’t have any fertility issues, it’s a relatively simple road from there. I won’t charge you for my time.”

Betty was still staring at him. The silence dragged, and dragged, until all at once words seemed to erupt from her throat in a way that surprised her as much as him: “What the hell happened over there?”

“Do you want to have a baby?” Bill asked.

“Of course I do,” Betty said. She slid forward on the chair so her hands were curled together right by his across the desk. “ _ Of course _ I do. But I also want to know what sort of life-changing experience you had with Britain's worst cop because if I weren’t hearing you say the words ‘I was wrong’ with my own ears I wouldn’t believe you could. I’m still working on believing it.”

“Of course I could be wrong…”

“Yeah,” Betty snapped, “of course you  _ can _ be, and you  _ have _ been, but you don’t  _ say it _ . There’s a lot to saying words like that, boss. There’s a lot to hear in them if you listen right. I’m just saying, it’s nice to have your faith in someone rewarded, you know?”

There was really nothing to say to that. Betty didn’t seem to expect that he would form a response so she just patted his curled fists with her soft palm as she got back to her feet.

“I’ll get Helen on the schedule. In the meantime, as much as I know it pains you, try to be nice to the patients? They’re the one that’s going to pay for your divorce.”

Bill snorted at that, and was pulling his phone out of his pocket as soon as Betty’s back was turned. Alec had  _ finally _ managed a response: 

** _Well, lucky for me, I’ve got a new medication routine and surgery ahead if it doesn’t work out. _ **

** _Looks like you left me for no reason._ **

–

There wasn’t enough to do in Hardy’s life anymore. The medical restrictions took away his ability to drive. They limited the amount of time he could work. They limited the amount of activity he could do at all. 

It felt, at times, as if he were always just a few inches away from fainting onto an ornate couch like some damsel in a period piece. Even if he  _ wanted _ to think of himself with some hope, the way the town had taken to looking at him prevented it. While they’d looked at him with pity before, the stares had started to develop into a sort of dawning  _ surprise _ . Each and every one of them seemed to think he’d outlasted some expectation just by showing up to do his weekly shopping.

Trouble was, Hardy was truly alone.

That was the only thing his wife had said to him when he took all the blame from her and told the whole world he’d let a child murderer go free out of incompetence. She hadn’t apologized for the look in their daughter’s eyes when he packed his things to leave. 

But she had followed him out to the car, and she’d looked at him with such worry, and she’d said, ‘you’ll be alone. You’ll force yourself to be alone. I know you, Alec. You’re going to kill yourself over this.’

But she  _ hadn’t _ said that she wouldn’t let him. She’d only implied she wished he wouldn’t.

Still, there was  _ Bill _ , at least. 

** _No reason? I seem to remember you leaving the hospital AMA twice while I was there._ **

It could have been that it was easier to hold conversations without faces staring at him. It could have been Bill’s dryness, and his  _ lack _ of overt empathy. It could have just been the ease of talking without worrying about any direct consequences, but this was  _ fun _ . It was  _ easy _ and it made him feel  _ better _ .

In a place where his death was an almost certainty, and the people around him were already selecting funeral arrangements, Hardy was starving for  _ better _ .

** _Yes, well we all have our faults. Remind me of the time difference, shouldn’t you be working?_ **

** _I am._ **

** _Very diligently, I see._ **

** _Well, if you must know, I pissed off my last client and I don’t have another for an hour. _ **

Hardy snorted at the phone. 

** _Get a partner to handle the people. That’s what I do._ **

** _I’m going to have to. _ **

Hardy missed Ellie. It snuck up on him, time to time. That realization that he might have had a friend. He hadn’t wanted one; he hadn’t intended to make one. But Ellie Miller was the sort of person that you couldn’t effectively fight against. She had become important to him, and he  _ missed _ her. He missed her separately than how he missed his job and his health. 

** _So do it_ ** , he sent to Bill.

** _I will_ ** **. ** ** _I don’t know why I haven’t. I wasn’t ready to_ ** **.** _ _

That was the hell of it, wasn’t it? Making any step toward the future; changing your circumstances even by a matter of inches, it meant that things were truly over. It didn’t matter that time could never go back; it only mattered that until you admitted it, you could keep pretending that things hadn’t changed.

** _Well, when you’re ready. So, what TV did you watch last night? You didn’t text._ **

\--

Bill must have loved his wife. At some point, he must have loved her. He couldn’t have been enough of a bastard to marry a woman just because she checked a box that he needed checked. 

Sure, he was enough of a bastard to realize that he’d simply gotten bored of her. He’d built up a tolerance to the comfort of a well-kept home; he’d grown resentful of her attempts to make him happy. He’d blamed her for wanting more of his attention than he wanted to give; he’d punished her for his own guilt.

But before all that, when she was fresh, and new, and not yet resigned to the limited life he’d been willing to offer, he must have loved her. He must have looked forward to seeing her face in the morning. He must have slid his arm around her back, and leaned into her body in the kitchen. They must have kissed like newlyweds over cups of steaming coffee. He must have listened to her plans for the day; she must have told him to have a good day and that she’d miss him.

(It was just, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t remember that giddy,  _ electric _ feeling of falling in love.)

Bill didn’t have a wife to kiss in the kitchen, but he had a hot cup of coffee from the new machine he’d finally purchased for himself. His house was quiet as an empty church but he had his phone, and Alec’s early-morning-thoughts waiting for a response.

Alec said: 

** _What are grits?_ **

** _They don’t pleasant to eat._ **

** _Who thought of that name? Grits?_ **

** _Is that description of the texture? _ **

** _I get to go to work today. At least for a few hours._ **

There must have been a name for the sort of smile that reading those nonsense texts brought to his face. Bill knew there was something ticklish, and  _ dangerous _ wrapped up in the way he had started looking forward to waking up. He didn’t want to put any words to anything; he just wanted to enjoy the moment.

Bill sent back:

** _If you’re set on insulting grits, I’ll be forced to bring up blood pudding._ **

** _Or really anything that you might call pudding._ **

** _And then we’ll have to talk about haggis._ **

The anticipation of a future response kept a smile on his face all through getting dressed, and morning traffic. It filled up his voice when he said hello to Betty and accepted his schedule for the morning. It kept him company in his office, standing by the window, thinking that he really should get a plant sooner or later.

He really should be doing a good deal of things. He should be looking for a new partner to fill the vacant role. He should be interviewing divorce lawyers. He should be coming up with a reasonable custody arrangement regarding his children, one that he was going to fight for. (Because, removed of his own selfishness he did love his children.) 

His phone chimed from his pocket. He was smiling even before he made it through the lock screen to see the text waiting for him. The conversation with Alec was still open on the screen, but the new message wasn’t from him.

No.

The message was from a phone number he’d memorized, but never programmed into his phone. It sent a spike of something that felt like joy, and anger, and  _ fear _ coursing straight through his body. It left his hands clenching and his knees feeling just a bit wobbly, just for a matter of milliseconds. 

Bill didn’t open it. He spun in a circle like the person that had sent it would be standing behind him. He could imagine exactly what her expression would be, how neutral her smile would be. How perfectly parted her hair always was. He could almost smell the scent of her perfume-and-laundry soap. There was the phantom ache of  _ wanting _ that was so sudden and so  _ sharp _ that he could convince himself nothing had changed at all.

But he was alone in the room.

It smelled like yesterday’s vacuuming and a fine layer of dust. 

Bill lifted the phone again. He steeled himself against hope-and-disappointment, and he opened the message.

** _I’ll be back to work next Monday. I’d appreciate the chance to meet with you regarding a few necessary changes._ **

Oh hell. If he’d been given a thousand years, Bill would never have been prepared to hear from Virginia  _ ever _ again. 

–

** _Are you alright?_ **

The text had been sitting in place for nearly a full forty-eight hours. Hardy consoled himself that, should this be the end of something, he hadn’t lost much. A great flurry of texts, and a bit less boredom in his day was all he’d gotten from this ongoing situation.

(But something had changed for Bill. And maybe Hardy had sat like a silly old man and scrolled through everything he’d sent to the man in the past few days. Maybe he’d tried to work out if poking fun at grits was something that couldn’t be forgiven.)

The long-long stretch of silence had left him restless. It had aggravated a condition that he’d been ignoring. While Broadchurch had been able to start the healing process (at least until the trial began), Sandbrook was still an ugly red wound in Hardy’s past. 

The Latimers  _ knew _ what happened to their son; they knew who had done it. They were able to bury their child with some idea that justice would be served. And where justice wouldn’t do, they had enacted vengeance. (Against Miller, who deserved it least.)

Sandbrook was an unanswered insult.

Sandbrook was a quickening of his tired heart.

He sat on his front porch, with his elbows digging into his knees, listening to the sound of the waves. He kept his eyes closed, and his mouth hanging open to draw in the thick wet air. He concentrated on clearing his mind of terrible memory of a little girl’s corpse left to rot in water.

He tried to unwind it from the memory of his wife, standing by a car, whispering: ‘ _ you’ll kill yourself over this _ .’

Because Hardy wasn’t going to  _ die _ before he’d finished. If he kept his eyes closed, and he  _ thought _ about it very hard, he could remember the details. He sorted them out in his mind, rearranging them into familiar patterns. There was an answer in the jumble, if he shook it enough times it would have to make sense.

The chime of his phone, left sitting inside on the counter, dragged him back out of the fog. Hardy squinted out at the brightness of the sun sparkling on the water; he flexed his fingers to work off the chill.

Maybe he told himself that he wasn’t going to run inside to see if he’d finally gotten a response. He told himself that he could make whoever was bothering him wait. (He told himself that regardless of who it was, they deserved to wait.)

But Hardy was already getting to his feet, dragging himself up the few steps and through his door. He found the phone in the kitchen and opened the screen to find that Bill had  _ finally _ sent a response.

(And Hardy thought, he almost wished Bill hadn’t.)

** _The woman with whom I had an affair is coming back to work._ **

** _I loved her._ **

Yes, well. Hardy had loved his wife and look how that turned out. Sometimes it wasn’t enough to love something; sometimes it just didn’t work. Hardy was still trying to figure out how Bill felt about things when the phone chimed again.

** _I think I was happy before. I haven’t been happy since I got her text._ **

Hardy frowned at his phone. There was nothing to say, and still he had to say  _ something _ . 

He sent:  ** _You don’t have to let her come back._ **

Bill said:  ** _It’s not her fault. _ ** _ _

** _It’s not always about whose fault it is. _ **

** _It’ll be fine. We’re both adults, and I needed to hire new staff members for a while. I’ll hire one, and she can hire one. _ **

That was the plan of a desperate man. There was no telling if Bill wanted her back or didn’t. There was no telling if he was trying to protect himself from her, or protect her from him. Maybe it was the same thing between them.

** _All settled then._ ** _ _ Hardy sent.  ** _So, I believe you still owe me an explanation about grits._ **

\--

Bill was not ready to sit across a table from Virginia Johnson. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that he would ever be ready for again. In fact, given an infinite time to prepare himself, Bill was certain that he would never have reached a point at which he felt capable of this moment. Some things were best when they were beyond your own control.

Virginia was now, as she had always been, a beautiful woman. He could not look at her without remembering how desperately he had longed to rest his cheek on her warm skin. At how quickly, and how deeply, he had started to crave her. Maybe, when they were brand new to the affair, he had really believed it was all a matter of work. Maybe he’d really convinced himself that they’d attached electrodes to themselves and called it science and that it really had been about the science. (Maybe it had been for her.) But that first taste of her had ruined him; every moment after he had lived with an insatiable desire to touch her again.

And he had.

(Oh, hell, he had touched her over and over and in every way a man possibly could.)

Those things were in the past now. Bill looked at Virginia and he remembered the warmth of her skin, and the softness of her touch, and the way her breath caught on the edge of his name. 

Virginia looked at him with polite detachment. If she remembered the intimate details of their past; she didn’t remember them with any urgency or fondness. Her hands were folded over a pad of paper she’d brought to the meeting. Her back was straight. Her hair was falling around her face in soft waves, framing the slight pinkness of her cheeks. Her smile was patient, but her voice was crisp. “I think we can both agree that it is in our best interest, and in the best interest of the work that we find suitable replacements for one another. In a work capacity of course.”

“Yes,” Bill said. He agreed by rote, without vigor. He was as aware as she was that his opinion didn’t matter anymore. “Yes, that is what’s best for the– For the work.”

“I would expect you would want to hire your own new assistant. I would like the authority to hire my own as well.”

“Of course.”

Virginia’s smile was strained. There was the faintest worry at the edge of her lips, but she brushed it away. Her attention refocused on the list in front of her; her finger ran down the line of demands to be sure that she’d covered everything she’d intended.

“In fact,” Bill said before any more points could be raised, “I–uh, I have been needing someone that I could trust to run things here. Betty’s been doing a good deal of the work and that’s– She’s been doing a very good job, but it’s not really her job to do. So, as soon as you’re settled, I need to take some time away from the office.” He cleared his throat. (He thought to himself, this pain in his chest was a part of healing. Nothing broken ever healed without hurting first.) “I need to sort out some personal things.”

“I’ll be settled by the end of the week, I’m sure,” Virginia said. “Take all the time you need, Bill.” The meeting was brought to a close with those words. She gathered up the few things she’d brought, tucked them against her chest and turned to leave the conference room. She wasn’t retreating, but off to return as her rightful place as the most well-liked and hardest-working person in the building. She was off to secure her place with the other staff, to reassure them that things would be put right again, and to clear away the dust that had settled in her untouched office. 

Virginia stopped just at the doorway, with her fingers resting against the door jamb and her confident smile turning soft, and uncertain. “Thank you for making this an easy transition, Bill. I am confident that we will get past this initial uneasiness. We both believe in what we’re doing here. We both know it’s more important than either of us.”

Bill smiled; he nodded. He tried to squeeze words out of his aching throat. He meant to say he agreed with her. He thought this work was important. He always had. But just then, looking at the table top because he couldn’t bear to look at her, he thought he might have been wrong about everything he’d ever believed.

–

** _As much as enjoy your vague details about a case you’re not at liberty to discuss in detail, I have no idea how to help you._ **

** _There must be someone that you can review the case with that understands better._ **

Hardy didn’t mind honesty; he didn’t even mind being told no. He wasn’t frustrated at Bill for stating obvious things. What little information he’d been able to explain through time-consuming texting had been riddled with holes because Hardy really wasn’t supposed to be sharing any details.

What limited responses he got back were hindered by the fact that Bill was an American and a doctor and neither of those things qualified him to be any good at solving the crimes that needed solving.

Hardy did have someone much closer in terms of geography and ability. He’d been eyeing her number in his phone off and on for days. He’d thought about how she must have been getting along in her new job while he sat out on his front stoop watching the water rolling toward him. The gathering cold nipped at his fingers and the tip of his nose and he thought of how annoying it might have been to suffer through the holidays with Ellie Miller.

She seemed like the sort that would start preparing for Christmas in November. The one that would hum Christmas carols under her breath, and insist on greeting every person with cheerfulness. She would have invited him for dinner again. She would have forced him to drink eggnog. She might even have harangued him into some appreciation for the whole season.

Yes, Christmas with Ellie Miller would have been hell.

But at least it would have been a busy, colorful sort of hell. Not the hell that was stretching out before him, as an endless gray nothing. If he were lucky, he might convince his daughter to call him back on the holiday. (He’d already started in on it too. That’s who he was, barely November and he was already dropping hints in his usual phone calls about how nice it would be to hear from her in real time. At how he missed her. At how the holidays were coming.)

Hardy was working up his courage to ask Miller to meet him somewhere. He was preparing a speech about how he wanted her help to solve this crime–unofficially of course–and why it was a decent use of their time. He was still reviewing the fine points of his argument, and that had to be the reason he hadn’t called her yet.

Bill interrupted his brooding, with another text announcing itself with a pert chirp of his phone. Across an ocean and God-only knew how many miles, Bill Masters was thinking of him. He said:

** _I can’t help you with the detective aspects, but I can listen if there’s things you need to get off your chest._ **

Hardy smiled at the phone, with the sensation of his heart breaking just a little more.  ** _What I’ve got to say isn’t going to fit in this little text box._ **

Time passed by breaths and heartbeats. Hardy was sitting on his front stoop, feeling like a fool, wondering what Bill must have thought of him. It was a dangerous game to feel so at ease with someone you couldn’t even see. 

The response took less than a minute, and it sat there for at least ten:

** _You could call._ **

A man should never be ruled by impulse. Decisions like these required the proper amount of thought. (But why did they? Why should he take time to decide if it were a good idea to call a friend? Why should he linger over it with worry, with his heart beating loud in his chest? Why should he worry at all? Bill was only a friend. This was only a phone call.) Hardy had been the one to press the call button, but the sound of the ringing in his ear still startled him. The first plucked strings of panic swelled in his throat. He might have even ended the call before it could go through but–

“You called,” Bill said.

“Oh,” Hardy answered with his thumb pushing into his eye socket, “was I not meant to? I can hang up if I’m–”

“No,” Bill said with a rush. The noise behind him turned off, and his voice evened as he continued, “no, I’m glad you called. You hadn’t answered my text, I was afraid that I’d overstepped.”

“It’s just a phone call,” Hardy said, “between friends.”

Bill’s words were a polite smile, “of course. That’s what I thought exactly. You need a friend and I need a friend, and this is only a phone call.”

It was too cold, and too open, and too  _ public _ to be outside now. Phone calls like this one were meant for inside spaces so Hardy picked himself up to go back into his little cottage. He locked his door and found a nice place on the couch to relax into. “How did things go with Virginia?”

“I sat there like an idiot, nodding my head, agreeing with everything she said.”

Hardy grimaced at that. “Did she ask you for anything outrageous?”

“No,” Bill sighed, “I don’t want to talk about Virginia. We could talk about your case, or anything else. Not Virginia, not right now.”

“I don’t want to talk about the case yet,” Hardy said. He was searching for a reason to make this phone call worth the effort, grasping at anything that he could think of to make a conversation out of. “You could explain Thanksgiving to me. That’s happening soon, isn’t it?”

Bill snorted, “what do you want to know about Thanksgiving?”

“I don’t know, tell me about it.”

Bill had a voice meant to be heard, and a mind that had spent years soaking up every detail that it happened across. He was a terribly intelligent man wrapped up in awkward man’s skin, but he eased into explaining the mundane details of the holiday like he was explaining something of great importance. 

“Are you still listening?”

“Of course I am,” Hardy answered, “keep talking.”


	7. Chapter 7

Sitting opposite a lawyer with a very expensive tie and a bulldogish face, Bill Masters could not help but recall his most recent conversation with Alec. Maybe that was because it was so appropriate to the moment and maybe it was because Bill had always had an excellent memory for the things he’d heard. Anything said by Alec Hardy was a breeze to remember. 

He’d said:  _ the worst thing about a divorce is sitting across from the man about to get rich from your misfortune. _

This was the third lawyer that Bill had interviewed in as many days. While the others had been reassuring enough about how they would facilitate the process with as much tact and ease as possible, this one’s face lost a bit of it’s hopeful glimmer when Bill got to the part of the conversation where he mentioned his wife wanted nothing from him by his children.

“And you,” the man said, almost hopefully, “will be contesting?”

“I’d like to be able to see my children.”

“Weekends?” the man prompted, “certain holidays? Would you prefer to keep them over the summer? Half the year? What sort of custody arrangement would you prefer?”

It was the third time Bill had been asked, and the third time he’d stood in a seat that suddenly felt too hot and too small, while he stared back at a man who had only asked because of his professional interest. Bill had no answer for what sort of arrangement he would prefer because he’d never been asked to pick the days of the week he wanted to spend time with his children.

(No, he’d gone the opposite route, the one where he simply didn’t see them at all.)

“Well,” Bill said when it became obvious to both of them that no answer was forthcoming. “Thank you for your time. I have your card.” He shook the man’s hand because it was expected and as soon as he was out on the street again he thought very seriously about how nice it would be to have some kind of hand sanitizer.

Maybe he could coat his whole body in it and finally wash away the greasy, uneasy feeling that maybe he was simply being a coward about the whole thing. He was on his third interview in a row to find a man to go before a judge and plead the case that Bill Masters did not deserve to be married to Libby (and never had, probably). He was searching for someone that could slip him a piece of paper with the answers he hadn’t taken the time to figure out for himself. (Yes, Your Honor, Bill Masters would like to see his children twice a month on weekends with a week in the summer and the week following Christmas. Of course he thought up all these dates himself, Your Honor. They are very meaningful to him, Your Honor.)

That was to say nothing about how he’d run as fast as his legs could carry him from his own business last Friday. How he’d stopped only long enough at Virginia’s door to be sure that she was properly settled and to leave her a summation of his current clients. 

He hadn’t even gone over it with her. He’d left her a sheet of hand written notes with his impressions.

He sat in his car, in a parking lot, thinking that everything that had been true about his life up to this point could be forgotten. He was caught up in a wave of cowardice, yes. He was  _ afraid _ . 

It shouldn’t have been a revelation. Bill Masters had marks on his bones to prove just what sort of awfulness there was to be afraid of in his ugly world. But it came over him like a wave, a great slideshow of spinning images. He could smell his own blood smeared across his face, and he could feel the thick-hot-pads of his father’s fingertips gripping his face. The smell of liquor seeping through the spaces in his teeth as he sneered at Bill like he was  _ nothing _ at all, hissing: 

_ Aren’t you ever going to learn? Aren’t you ever going to learn, boy _ ?

Bill had learned plenty in his father’s house. He’d learned it in his mother’s kitchen pressing ice against his aching face. He’d learned it in his bedroom long after dark winding shop-lifted medical tape around his broken fingers. He’d learned all he needed to learn about the worth of a man, standing in front of his teachers, telling them he’d been boxing with his kid brother again.

The wave dragged him onward, swirled him around the panic of finding yourself suddenly orphaned on the steps of a school you’d never heard of. It caught him in a paralyzing moment, when all his instincts demanded he beg the man that broke his fingers to take him back. But Bill Masters never begged anyone in all his life. He’d stood there with a straight back and one crooked finger on his left hand, and he’d let it happen.

On and  _ on _ and  _ on _ it went.

All those lost and forgotten years of his life, all the mistakes. The image of Libby across a room. The memory of touching her hand for the first time, how purposefully he’d kissed her cheek. How he’d memorized facts about her that he’d learned from his friends. How he’d convinced her that he loved her because his heart was  _ aching _ . 

Oh hell, he was sitting in a car in a parking lot, drowning in the certainty that there was no way forward and no way back. He would exist only in that moment, for all the rest of time, because anything else was  _ unbearable. _

His phone chimed from where he’d dropped it on the passenger seat, and he thought (just for a millisecond) that he could throw it out the window. That it was as likely to be from work, or Libby, or Virginia, or nobody at all, as it was to be from--

But it was from Alec, right there in black and white, the words:

** _Don’t forget to tell me how it goes with number three._ **

\--

Miller had not invited him up for a quick cup of tea. She hadn’t suggested they meet at a nice sandwich shop in town. She hadn’t indicated that she thought it would be a good use of either of their times to stand awkwardly opposite one another in front of a teenager at the start of what was rapidly becoming a long shift. 

That was because Miller had never answered the text he’d sent her.

She had declined to answer his call.

“Well,” she said when she recovered the ability to speak, “you really are Britain’s Worst Detective.”

“I’ll buy you lunch?” Hardy offered. It had taken more effort than he would ever have admitted to find himself standing opposite Miller in this little sandwich shop. The first order of business had been finding an excuse to run into her sister, and the second had been convincing the sister that he really was interested in how Miller was doing.

(The fact that Hardy did miss her had not helped him sway the sister’s mind.)

He couldn’t drive, so he had to hire a cab to bring him out to meet her. 

And now Miller just sighed to herself with something like a smile pulling at the edge of her lips. “Well, if you’re offering.”

She ordered; Hardy found them a table. It was tucked into a corner out of the way of most of the tables. The sort of place that you sat and ducked your head and talked about confidential things. It suited the purpose of his meeting, all except for the garish little angels dangling from the frilly green garland hung across the window. 

“I don’t suppose you’ve come to tell me that you’re dying,” Miller said as soon as she was sitting. She unwrapped the edges of her sandwich with a proud nod to herself. Whether that was for her excellent culinary choices or her wit, it couldn’t be determined. 

“Uh,” Hardy said.

“Oh God,” Miller said before he could say another word. “It’s not, is it? Shit. Tell me it’s not.”

“Calm down, Miller. I’m not dying.” At least not any faster than he’d been dying last time they’d met one another. 

He cleared his throat as she squinted at him with exaggerated interest. Her eyes took in his messy hair, his unpressed shirt and settled on his fidgeting hands resting on the table.

“Well, you’re not very trustworthy are you? Chasing after murderers when you already knew your heart was--” There must not have been a word she wanted to use there because she just cleared her throat again and said, “so, what is it? Why did you need to see me?”

(Hardy had toyed with the idea of telling her that he was lonely. He had thought very seriously about telling her that he did miss her, and that he hoped she was doing as well as one could do under the circumstances. It was just, no matter how he phrased it in his head, it didn’t sound very much like the sort of thing he’d say to her.) 

“I want your help,” he said, “I want your help with Sandbrook.”

“I think I’ve had enough of child murderers for the year,” Miller said. “Frankly, I would have thought you had enough of them for a lifetime. Is this what you came for? Is this really what you came for?”

“ _ Miller _ ,” he cut in before she could start lecturing him. Not because he didn’t deserve it or because she didn’t deserve to be able to say her fill. Because their time was short and he only had the one chance to make his case. “The medicine they’ve been giving me for my heart--it’s not working.”

“So you are dying.”

“It’s not working as well as it needs to work,” he amended. “I’m going to have to get a pacemaker in the spring and when I wake up in that hospital bed, I don’t want--” 

He frowned at his own knuckles. At the memory of a little girl’s hair tangled around his fingers, at the terrible, cold weight of her body up against his. He thought of her mother, and of the picture in his wallet.

Hardy cleared his throat before he said, “I don’t want to wake up there, still not knowing what happened. Whoever killed those girls, I want them brought to justice.”

Miller was leaning back in her seat, arms over her chest, trying not to look like she cared about him. It was quite a beating she’d taken lately. The sort of thing that was enough to change a person for the worse in a way they couldn’t ever quite recover from. There was a hard shell that Miller had tried to construct around herself, but the kindness in her eyes hadn’t changed at all. She looked sideways, not at him, frowning at the proposal before her. “Why me?” she asked.

“I value your work, and your opinion, and I can’t do this alone.” God knows he’d tried.

“I don’t know if I can,” Miller whispered.

Hardy nodded at that. “If you can’t,” he conceded, “you can’t.” 

\-- 

Indecision had brought him to his wife’s front door but cowardice had made sure it was only after the children were at school. Bill had braced himself for a fight, but he hadn’t prepared himself for the way Libby answered the front door like he was hardly worth the effort it took to turn a lock.

Libby leaned against the door with her body blocking the way. She frowned at him without saying a word; looking furious and beautiful all at the same time. 

“I’d like to come in.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t,” Libby said, but she moved back to give him space to come in. Her voice was a cut in the quiet of the entryway. “But, it would be insanity to think that Bill Masters was capable of caring about what  _ I  _ wanted. After all, we’ve been married long enough.”

“Have I done something to make you angry?” It wasn’t the question that was the wrong thing to say. It was that he waited until there were no witnesses. He closed the door to anyone that might have wandered past, he stood inside the house that Libby had worked so tirelessly to make a home.

She laughed like heartbreak. 

“Recently?”

Libby paused at the bar. (She hadn’t, in her rage, cleared out his bar as thoroughly as she’d cleared out his closet.) She tipped over two cups and filled them generously. When she was done, she drank from one and pressed her palm over the open mouth of the other like trying to smash it flat into the bar top. “I told you all I wanted was the kids, Bill. You never even wanted them.”

“Now, wait just a–”

But there was no kindness left in his wife. That’s what he’d done to her. He’d taken the sweetest woman he’d ever met and he used her up with his selfishness. He’d made her as miserable as he was, spitting angry with a pink laugh at the edge of her mouth. She said, “don’t waste your time, Bill. I had to  _ beg _ you to even try to have a baby. I had to go behind your back to have Johnny. The only reason we have Jenny or Howie was because you were already fucking Virginia.” She took another gulp of liquor and slapped the empty cup on the counter. Her fingers curved around the second glass like claws.

“That’s not true,” Bill said.

“And you lied to me!” Libby shouted. “For years, you lied to me. You said it was my fault we couldn’t have a baby! You  _ comforted _ me while I  _ cried _ . Every month you rubbed my back and you promised that you still loved me and I thought what a nice man you were! I thought, how lucky I am! You fucking bastard.” 

The glass shattered across the floor where Libby threw it. The liquor sloshed out in a puddle of glass shards. 

Bill looked at his hands because he couldn’t bear to look at his wife. “Regardless of my mistakes,” he said (very softly), “they’re my children. I don’t know–maybe it is too late. Maybe they hate me. Or maybe I’m just not meant to be a father. But I  _ am _ their father and I’m not ready to give them up without at least trying, Libby. I didn’t come here to fight.”

Libby laughed at that.

“I came to  _ try _ to find some solution, some compromise that allowed me to see my children. Something that didn’t have to be argued out in a courtroom, something that you could agree with.”

“I think you’re expecting too much from me, Bill.” Libby flipped over another glass and filled it the same as the first. She turned it in circles again and again. 

“Libby,” Bill said, “I’m  _ sorry _ .”

She lifted the glass to her mouth and took a sip and then dropped it again. “Well, I’m sorry too, Bill.” 

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about. It was me, I– I– ”

Libby scoffed as she turned to look at him again. Her face was spotted pink and red; she was shaking her head at him. “I fucked at least four other men while we were married, Bill. You never noticed. How could you? You were never home long enough to wonder where I was. You never looked at my body long enough to wonder where the marks came from. You never fucked me with any passion, to wonder when I got so loud, or where I learned to move my body like that.”

Bill’s fingers were curled into fists. There was no fairness in all the world or he would have stood there absorbing every single word without protest. He would have let her detail her every sexual encounter, he would have apologized for driving her to anger so bright and painful. “ _ I _ never fucked you with passion?” he shouted back, “you never  _ wanted _ passion! Right from the start, all you wanted was a baby! All you wanted was to look good for the other families, to dress nice and smile. You never looked at  _ me _ with any passion.”

Libby smacked him and Bill grabbed her wrist to pull it away before she could do it again. Libby’s teeth were bared, her breath a furious wet hiss and her body an aggressive press against his arm trying to hold her back. “I bet you fucked Virginia like you meant it.”

If Bill were a better man he wouldn’t have moved  _ forward _ ; if Libby were a better woman she wouldn’t have wrapped her hands around his face and dragged him up against her body.

But they were only suited for one another in that way, neither of them capable of happiness where the other was concerned.

–

Alec Hardy had a murder to solve. He’d gone through all the trouble of a day trip to ask his former partner to come and help him. He’d managed to be charming enough (probably not) or pathetic enough (more likely) to convince her to come and at least  _ look _ at the files.

He’d gathered everything he had on Sandbrook. He’d arranged it on the table and written out some of his key thoughts and top questions regarding the case.

Hardy, who had no culinary leanings, had gone through the trouble of making certain there was edible food in his house. He’d purchased and baked muffins so he’d have something fresh and nice to eat. 

All this he’d done; and none of it mattered. He was sitting on his front porch when Miller arrived, looking wind-chapped and tired, pushing Fred in his stroller over all the little rocks along the path. She stopped a few feet away just so he could see her struggling attempt at a smile fade from her face. “That’s some thanks I get, coming all this way to see you. I had to bring Fred, you know. Because Tom’s moved out! How can an eleven year old boy just move himself out of home? I don’t know how it happened. But it did, and I dragged myself all the way down here to see you scowling at me.”

“Miller,” Hardy said before she could really get into it. He pulled himself up to standing and went down to help her lift the stroller up the stairs.

“Are you sure you’re allowed to be lifting?” Miller asked half way through.

Inside, at least, it was warm. Fred was set loose in the very little room that passed as a living room. Miller pulled her scarf out of her zipped up jacket as she took note of the smell of fresh muffins. 

“Oh,” she said to herself. “Well, it’s nice that you’ve some effort in. If you didn’t go around greeting people with a sour face all the time, maybe more people would like you.”

“I don’t need people to like me,” Hardy snapped. In fact, he wasn’t even interested in people liking him. Putting too much time into being likable never worked out for anyone.

He’d been likable enough to get a wife but not likable enough to keep her. He was likable enough to have a daughter that loved him but just not quite enough to have his daughter return his phone calls with any regularity.

(Likable enough to have a transatlantic friendship with a sex doctor from America but not likable enough to keep the bastard from fucking his future ex-wife and then telling Hardy about it.)

“Well, it wouldn’t hurt,” Miller said. She pulled out the chair in front of the table where he’d set up all the files. He hadn’t even so much as put his hand on the chair that he meant to pull out to sit next to her, when she jerked her head to look at him with outrage. “You’re not sitting here with me. No. No, sir. You go over there–back there with Fred. I’ll look over everything and we can talk then but not before. Go on.”

Fred, a round faced toddler, was sitting on Hardy’s floor with a sack of blocks and his thumb in his mouth. He had the distinct dumb-struck look one got when they were sudden put into a situation they had no idea how to handle. He tipped his head back to look at Hardy, and the pair of them simply stared at one another.

“Fine,” Hardy said. He sat on the floor with the toddler and his blocks. “Your Mum’s not very nice.”

“I  _ can _ hear you,” Miller said.

Fred pulled a block out of his sack to hand it to Hardy. He set it on the floor between them and so it went, Fred handing him blocks and Hardy setting them down again until they’d made a little square tower. As soon as it was built up, Fred knocked it over with violently glee.

Then they started again.

(There was a metaphor in there, surely, about the nature of life and the pointlessness of it all.)

Still, Fred was thrilled.

Hardy’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he frowned at the stack of tower as he moved his hand away from fitting in the last block. Fred shrieked in joy as he punched the tower and sent the blocks flying in all directions. While he rounded them up again, Alec pulled his phone out of his pocket.

It was Bill.  _ Bill _ was saying:  ** _Is everything alright? I didn’t mean to upset you. If I shared too much, I’m sorry._ **

Was everything all right? Yes, everything was fine because Bill was nothing more than a way to pass the time and Hardy had no rights to his time or his body or his loyalty. It didn’t matter that fucking your future ex-wife up against a home bar was a stupid idea for more reasons than Hardy could count. It didn’t matter that sort of thing was the exact reason divorces were ugly and messy. It didn’t even matter that Bill was  _ hurt _ by the stupidity of his own impulses, that he was lost, that he was looking for reassurance and comfort.

It didn’t matter at all.

Hardy had listened, and he’d told him these sorts of things did happen.

And Hardy wasn’t upset about it. It didn’t  _ matter _ to him where Bill went off and put his cock. When he was finished with his future ex-wife, he could go find his ex-lover and fuck her too and Hardy still wouldn’t care.

(It would be stupid; the very same way fucking Libby had been stupid. But that was just who Bill was. A stupid man.)

Fred nudged the block against Hardy’s hand once he’d rounded them all up. Hardy sighed at the little boy, and the blocks, and the quiet, and life, and stupid American sex doctors. He set the block on the floor.

Fred handed him another one.

“You could help build this,” he said to the boy. (Fred, who seemed very bright, obviously knew that he could help. But he didn’t want to help. He wanted Hardy to do the work so that Fred could destroy it.)

When they came to a pausing point (meaning, when Fred had to find all the blocks he kicked around Hardy’s living room), Hardy stared at his phone a moment longer before, impulsively, childishly, rudely replying:

** _Why would I care who you sleep with?_ **

And something twisted up in his gut with devilish happiness. Some half-thought thing wriggled and squirmed as he leaned back into the chair, watching a toddler collect blocks, and thinking about a grown man an ocean away waiting for some reply on his phone.

Hardy thought of Bill, alone, in his half-furnished little apartment, staring at the phone. And he thought, how his hopeful face might sadden just a little when he read the words. And just for that moment, the thought that it mattered at all to Bill Masters made Alec Hardy  _ happy _ .

The reply came through so quickly that Bill must have been staring at the phone waiting. 

It said:  ** _Of course. I’m sorry for assuming_ ** _ . _


	8. Chapter 8

A man had decide what he was willing to give up. Bill hadn’t decided and that must have been why he lost everything. All those decisions: whether to commit to Virginia fully or stay with his wife? Whether to love his children or tolerate their existence? Whether to atone for his past misdeeds or pretend they never happened. He’d wavered in and out of intentions for so long that everyone he thought would wait indefinitely had decided for themselves how they wanted to be treated.

Bill was left with the thing he’d spent his life pursuing. His study. His most precious lover. The thing that he had thought would bring him happiness. And he had it still, after he’d lost all the other things he’d never tried to keep. 

Bill wasn’t happy.

Bill was laying on his couch, with a crust of chip crumbs pressed into his cheek, watching nonsense procedurals. He hadn’t moved since the last time he’d used a bathroom. And excluding trips to the toilet and kitchen for fresh supplies of snacks, he hadn’t moved at all.

(Not since a skinny man with no bearing on his life, said he didn’t care who Bill slept with.)

He told himself (at first) that he was taking some time for himself. He’d convinced his brain that his body needed the rest. When the excuse stretched thing, he laid in a slump and he thought about what he planned to do next. 

All his daydreams were fantastic plots to leave this place he was  _ in _ and never come back to it. He imagined plane rides like escape plans. He could go anywhere in the world. Libby didn’t want his money but Bill had tons of it. He was swimming in wealth. He never had to work a day in his life again.

All that frantic energy he’d wasted on the study had amounted to nothing but this moment. Discoveries had been made. Babies had been conceived and delivered. Women had covered his office in thank you letters and baby pictures and Christmas cards. He had a scrapbook of newspaper clippings. He had a certain reputation of infamy.

And he had a crumb-covered couch, and unwashed smell, and a swell of self-pity.

He had a phone with no new messages. He had a flagging sense of arrogance about how he shouldn’t have to be the one to send the next text. But a week later and Alec hadn’t so much as sent a hello through.

Bill had thought a lot about possibilities and plane rides. He’d thought about the merit of throwing himself into anything at all that took him away from where he was right now. And he thought of how disheveled and out of order his life would be if he didn’t stop and pick it up.

Between one predictable conclusion and the start of another repetitious episode, Bill picked up his phone to say:

** _How’s the case?_ **

And he thought, if you squinted at the words hard enough you could certainly mistake them for:  _ I miss you _ .

–If he could have managed it, Hardy would have been pissed. All his best effort toward anger left him too exhausted to do anything but sit quietly in place and stew. He just marinated in his anger, letting it simmer under his skin until it followed him into his dreams and out again.

“Well you’re in a mood,” Miller said right at the start. She was pushing Fred up the path to his front door, looking haggard enough herself to not want to deal with him. She stopped when she said it, and looked back over her shoulder. “Alright,” she said, “let’s go. Get your coat, we’re going to get something to eat. Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear it. I’m hungry, and you’re grouchy and we won’t get anything done.”

They found themselves smashed into a little booth in a corner of a nice enough restaurant. Fred was tucked between his Mom and the wall, boxed in and unable to cause trouble. He had a selection of toys that he didn’t seem to be interested in playing with. 

Miller was staring at the menu with a frown pinched between her eyebrows. She was managing what Hardy could only hope for. Her anger and discontent was as thick as a cloud around her. Even Fred was looking across the table at Hardy like he was expecting to be rescued from his upset mother. If the kid had been old enough to understand, Hardy might have told him that there was just nothing that could be done. Moms were people, and people got upset sometimes. 

“So,” Hardy said. (He didn’t used to be this awkward. He didn’t used to talk like he’d never used words before in his life.) “Has, uh, Tom come back?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Hardy stared at the menu laying on the table in front of him. He considered his heart-healthy options, and found that none of them appealed to him so he settled on the top option. When he was done (a busy five seconds later), he cleared his throat.

Miller glared at him over the top of the menu.

“How’s the–uh, the job?” Hardy asked.

“Aren’t you chatty today?” Miller dropped her menu down on the table so it was laying half-over his. She sighed like a great balloon of overheated air deflating. And then she said, “can’t we talk about anything else? Not work, and not murder, and not Tom. Can’t we talk about–what’s happening with you?”

Nothing was happening with Hardy. He’d been ignoring Bill Masters for a week. Although one could not count it as ignoring when he had not been sent any messages that required a response. He was being ignored in equal measure to the effort he was putting in ignoring. Hardy shrugged his shoulders.

That might even have been the end of it, but Miller looked like she was disappointed. Hardy was enough of a disappointment to himself without spreading it around. Miller’s disappointment looked like defeat and why wouldn’t it? Here he was, tucking away his secret ongoing involvement with Bill while Miller was trying to figure out how she planned on living her life. She was holding it together after a trauma that ripped her family to pieces. She was coping with loss, and grief, and guilt. 

“I,” Hardy found himself saying without any notion of how he intended to proceed. “I’m waiting for a text.”

“A text?” (Miller was unimpressed.)

“Yes. A text from Bill?”

“A text from Bill? Why are you still texting Bill? Bill does not deserve to be texted.”

“Miller–”

“Any man that can just pack up and leave, knowing what we know about your health. That’s not a man that you need in your life. And an American? A sex researcher? What have you got in common with him anyway? It can’t be a lot. What do you even talk about? Oh hello, Bill, seen any interesting…” The humor didn’t fail her but the presence of other families and her own son made her clear her throat rather than continue. She lifted her glass of water to take a sip. “A text from Bill,” she muttered to herself.

Hardy frowned at her.

“Don’t make that face at me. I’ve got more experience with men than you do. If I decide to start texting some other woman that leaves me on death’s door–”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m not on–”

“Then you can sit here and tell me all the same things. Not on death’s door? You collapsed!”

“Lower your voice,” Hardy hissed at her. He straightened up in his seat as if fixing the slouch his body preferred would make his health anymore respectable than it was. 

The conversation was interrupted by a very friendly waitress that didn’t seem interested at all in their personal drama. She made promises of quick delivery on the food and took their menus with her when she left. The quiet she left behind was as brief as a single breath.

“You’re waiting on a text,” Miller prompted.

“I’m not going to tell you about it if you’re going to be judgemental.”

Miller’s expression promised him that regardless of whether or not he explained himself, judgements had already been passed and they were not favorable. It felt good to have someone on his side. He was vindicated by Miller’s disapproval of Bill. Even as misplaced and misinformed as it was, there was a definite, relaxing camaraderie in disliking the same person at the same time. She managed to even out her expression into something approaching neutral as she said, “I’m sorry. I’ll try.”

(No, she wouldn’t.)

“Bill with his ex-wife and–”

“Why are you waiting on a text?” Miller all but shouted at him. Her hand slapped the table top in outrage and poor Fred, who had been idly pushing a toy around the table top, jumped. His little face went lax in shock and his lip trembled. Miller comforted him, but she was hissing, “have some respect for yourself, Hardy. Slept with his ex-wife. I bet he did. Accidentally, I assume. It’s always an accident with men like that. What happened?”

At some point, Hardy did need to tell Miller that he had never been dating Bill. He wasn’t dating the man now. He was just hinging a series of silly fantasies on the man. And it wasn’t fair to hinge his fictional happiness on the man but emotions were never fair.

“He went to talk to her about their children. It’s complicated. They only separated a few months ago.”

“A few months ago, and he’s already decided that he could move on? Must not have been much of a marriage.” 

Hardy hadn’t meant to smile, but a certain level of meanness felt good. He cleared his throat at the tail end of his little grin and said, “that’s enough, Miller. I told him I didn’t care who he slept with and he hasn’t answered. I don’t know, maybe it’s the end.”

Miller was going to explode, sitting there, biting her lips. She was putting so much effort into listening to him. She wasn’t shouting at him about how it was already over, that it shouldn’t have ever begun. But she was thinking it in very loud thoughts, projecting them across the table. “That’s a bad thing?” she managed to squeeze through her clenched jaw.

“We’re just friends,” sounded very nearly like a lie. It didn’t feel like the truth that Hardy wanted it to be. 

“Well, he’ll text you. If he doesn’t, he’s not a good friend. Not the sort of friend that would make a long drive to see you on her days off. Not the sort to make sure you get a decent amount of food once in a while. Not the sort that’s going to help you solve a case that’s ruined your reputation. A friend like that, well, you’d think maybe you might put a little bit more effort into sending a few more texts in her direction. But if it’s Bill that makes you happy…”

“Are we friends that text?” Hardy asked.

Miller just stared at him as if he were stupid. But when she spoke, the words were low and uncertain. “We could be.”

Life had been hell to her. It had driven her out of her home. It had robbed her of precious friends. It had left her alone, and hurting, and hurtful. 

“We should be,” Hardy agreed.    
  


\--

“Good,” said his immaculately dressed wife, when Bill answered the door with his shirt unbuttoned, untucked and unpressed. She was tugging her gloves off her hands as she breezed past him into the room with the air of a woman who required no invitation. “I was hoping you’d still be home.” 

She stood at the better end of his crumb-covered sofa with a wrinkled nose and a pointed, pained smile of politeness etched onto her face. The little marks he’d left on her neck had almost completely faded. (But the scratch marks she scoured down his back had not healed quite as quickly.) If she took note of the debris of a hastily tidied coffee table or the distinct smell of a grown man having spent far too much time laying in his filth, she was polite enough not to mention it.

“Libby, I don’t think it’s a good idea. You. Being here.” He pushed the door closed with one hand and pulled his shirt closed with the other. He felt stupid doing it, but the feeling was commonplace enough now that it didn’t stop him.

“Honestly Bill, the sex wasn’t worth the twenty years preceding it.”

“That’s not fair. It wasn’t all terrible.”

“It wasn’t all  _ great _ ,” Libby corrected. But she turned on her heels so she was facing him with an almost regretful stare. “I don’t want to get into it, Bill. I  _ don’t _ . I’m not interested in rehashing it. You have your way of seeing our marriage and I have mine. We’re never going to see it the same because we never wanted the same things. If we can’t admit that to each other...”

Neither of them knew how that sentence was meant to end. Bill wasn’t cringing because the words stung. He wasn’t even looking at Libby anymore.

“I didn’t come here to talk about us,” Libby said again. “I’m here to ask you,  _ again _ , to  _ really _ think about what you’re doing. To, for the  _ first _ time in our relationship, put someone else’s needs over your own.”

Bill jerked sideways at that. At the words, and the meaning behind them, and the implication that he hadn’t ever cared. (Maybe he hadn’t, what did he know, but it  _ felt _ like he had. It felt like he’d put in time, and effort, however little, however infrequently.) “I’m not giving up my children, Libby. If that’s what you came for, you can let yourself out!”

“Bill!” Libby’s steps were loud as drumbeats. Her hand caught him by the shoulder and she pulled him to stop most of the way to his bedroom. “ _ Think _ about it. You’re in no position to take care of children. You’re barely in a position to take care of yourself. There was half a pizza on the floor under your couch, Bill. Your shirt has wrinkles! Do you know how much bitching you did about your shirts? How many times I had to iron them and fold them before I finally did it the way you wanted it done? Look at this,” she pulled his shirt front away from his body to show him the wrinkles he already knew about.

“They’re  _ my _ kids too, Libby. You can’t just decide that they’re yours because you bullied me into them.”

“You never wanted them,” Libby said softly. “You never held them, you never sang to them--Bill you have a beautiful voice, and you’ve  _ never _ sang to our children. Maybe all of this had to happen, maybe we  _ never _ should have stayed together as long as we did. But this isn’t about you. This isn’t about me. For once, I am  _ begging _ you, make this choice based on what’s best for your kids.”

It was a terrible thing to ask a man who had never once had a choice made in his favor. A stark and ugly reminder that neither his mother nor his father had ever once asked themselves what would have been best. Mother turned her music up in the kitchen and gently closed doors. She protected herself from the beatings that hadn’t found their way to her. Father was a sadistic, cold bastard with boxer’s fists. 

“Am I that awful that my children will benefit more from never seeing me again?” Bill asked.

Libby’s hand smoothed down his shirtfront. Her meannes broke, just a little, and beneath it all the hurt he’d dealt her. She said, “maybe not always. But you have work to do.”

Bill was defenseless against the truth. He nodded his head. “Fine, fine. But--But, you’ll send me your address, and phone number and once I… Once I get settled, we’ll talk about…”

Libby nodded. “Of course we will, Bill.” 

(The way she said it, with such pity, couldn’t be entirely believed. Whether the waver in her voice was her lack of faith in him or her lack of ability to keep the promise was unknowable.)

\--

** _I’m returning to work today. _ **

** _I don’t know if my continued attempts at conversation are welcome at this point._ **

** _I hope you are well._ **

Bill’s texts came within seconds of one another. A great flurry of chirpy noises and vibrations from Hardy’s phone. Across an ocean, the man was working up the courage to go to work at a business he owned. Hardy was having his afternoon sit down, where he leaned back into his couch and waited to see if his heart was going to keep beating.

It wasn’t a work day for him. He had spent an hour or two staring at the Sandbrook case files, hoping to make some more sense of the same facts he’d already seen a dozen times. Miller hadn’t even come in and looked at the past weekend. Hardy hadn’t minded at the time, because he was tired enough just from the small talk they’d exchanged over dinner. 

Fred had been fussy. That’s what Miller said. Fred will just start fussing, and he won’t stop. 

Hardy had stood on his front step thinking about telling her that she could have let the boy sleep on Hardy’s bed. That there was no need to drive all the way back home. But he hadn’t said the words, so she had wished him a good night and left.

That was days ago now. Days of quiet, and awkward attempts to send Miller a text that seemed to be worth the time it took to compose it. He’d worried over his phone, agonized over a simple message, and in the end just sent her something like ( ** _what are we supposed to talk about?_ ** )

But these messages were from Bill. These messages were begging for a response. These messages didn’t bring him any sort of mean-spirited joy. 

Hardy sighed at himself, at his heart, at his cottage, at Bill, and pulled the phone off the table to type a reply.

** _Of course I want to talk to you_ ** , Hardy said. (And he left off the bit on the end that went something like: I just don’t want to hear about your stupid sex life.)  ** _Why are you going back if you don’t want to?_ **

** _That’s a relief_ ** , Bill sent all in a rush, and:  ** _I made a promise that I have been failing to keep. _ **

Hardy was working on crafting a reply that conveyed his interest without just blurting out:  _ what promise _ . The best he managed was:  ** _must be a big promise._ ** (And he cringed as he sent it.)

** _I’m going in to meet with my secretary’s wife to talk about the best methods to proceed for getting pregnant._ **

** _I’ve never met Betty’s wife._ **

There was a litany of possible answers to Bill’s statement. Hardy could invite him to talk about the promise, he could acknowledge what a significant promise it was. He could ask about Betty (because he’d heard the name, but he hadn’t heard any details). But he found himself slouching into a more comfortable slant on his couch. He sent:  ** _I don’t like meeting new people. _ **

** _It’s all awkward, everyone wants to tell you their name. They need you to repeat it._ **

** _Then you’ve got to worry, what sort of impression am I making? Do I need to make a good one? Am I ever going to meet these people again? _ **

Bill’s reply was a laugh wrapped up in little letters, he said:  ** _what a pair we’d make, never meeting new people for fear of first impressions._ **

Hardy smiled at the phone, and wished that little glow of warmth in his chest had been a little dimmer. It was one thing to amuse himself with long conversations and another thing entirely to be confronted with the reality of this growing knot. Bill had become, without Hardy’s consent, a person that he longed to talk to. Their conversations never had to be about anything at all. It only mattered that they had them.

And it was hell when Bill was so casual about their non-existent future. 

** _Come to Broadchurch, you’ve already made your first impression._ **

Bill’s answer was immediate:  ** _Yes. A bad one. _ ** And then:  ** _I have to go now, maybe we could talk later? I could call?_ **

Hardy was a fool, but he said:  ** _That would be fine._ **

\--

Bill was not, despite appearances, avoiding Virginia.

(Or maybe he was. She didn’t seem bothered by his avoidance. She was helping in her own way, always going left when he went right. It was a companionable co-avoidance of the other.)

Betty cleared her throat when Bill leaned back in his chair so he wasn’t as visible through the doorway when Virginia walked past. She was tapping her fingertips on the table, frowning at him for being a coward. “If you want, I could get up and close the door.”

“No,” Bill said, “don’t be silly.” But he didn’t lean forward again until Virginia had passed and the sound of her heels were no longer audible in the hall. “Now, should we start or would you like to wait until your wife arrives?”

“Helen is always a little late,” Betty assured him, “I would have brought her in with me this morning, but she had a client that was paying double to get her hair done this morning. If you want I can go until she gets here, let you get back to work.” She paused a second, just long enough stare at him with her disbelieving eyebrows, “in your office.” (As far from Virginia as he could get without leaving the building.) 

“No,” he said, “no, that won’t be necessary.”

“You’re going to have to talk to her eventually, boss. That’s the name on the door, you know? Masters  _ and Johnson _ .”

Well, that was assuming that Bill was planning on staying here. That was assuming that he even  _ wanted _ to stay here. He couldn’t name the feeling that was tying him to this office, but it didn’t feel like  _ purpose _ anymore. No, it felt a bit more like  _ fear _ . That if he went too far from this place he’d worked his whole life to get, that he’d be lost. The study was an anchor that had trapped him in this life. 

“I appreciate your concern, Betty--”

“No problem, boss.”

“But, I assure you that everything between Ms. Johnson and I is cordially professional now. I have spoken to her on multiple occasions.” (Accidentally, when good manners required that he greet her or policy demanded that he review her requests and reports.)

Bill was spared Betty’s response by a polite knock at the conference room door. Helen was breathless and pink-cheeked, made rosy with nervousness. 

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you, finally.” 

“Yes, it’s good to meet you as well. Betty’s said nice things about you,” Bill said as he stood to shake Helen’s hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Betty, still sitting in her seat, grinning at him like he was an idiot. They’d never had a single conversation about Helen in the years that they’d worked together. In part because Bill had never asked, and in part because Betty must not have trusted him. The first he’d even heard of Helen was when Betty asked for help to have a child. Bill had turned her down on the basis of traditional families. But that was their secret now, just a polite lie.

“Oh please,” Helen said, “I’m sure she was exaggerating. Thank you for making time to see us. We thought we were going to have to pay a man to have sex with me.” (And that, apparently was the worst fate Helen could imagine.)

“Well,” Bill said, “let’s not have it come to that. Although you will need a sperm donor if you haven’t already found one. It can be someone you know or an anonymous donor through a sperm bank. I have a list of recommendations of reputable businesses that deal in that sort of thing.”

“We’ve got someone in mind,” Betty assured him.

“He’s got a ton of kids,” Helen added as she pulled out a chair to sit in. “So, we know there won’t be any problems on his end. So, how do we start? Are their tests? I’ve always had very regular periods. I eat healthy. I exercise some. I don’t know what you need to know. Maybe I should just let you talk.”

Helen looked at her with such adoration. She smiled at Helen like she’d never loved anyone more fully in all her life. It was a look he’d never seen on Betty’s face, not once in all the time that he’d known her. (And even if he had already felt like an ass by denying her the chance at a child once; he felt  _ worse _ now.) 

“I don’t think he minds listening,” Betty assured Helen.

“Not at all,” Bill said. “I’d like to hear your expectations and your preferences. We can talk about the technical things in a minute.”

“Oh.” Helen set her purse on the chair next to her and shifted in her chair. She looked at Betty, like she hadn’t expected to be invited to talk at all. “Well, I’d like it all to be as natural as it can be. I know  _ obviously _ , there’s going to be some unnatural things. Obviously, I don’t want to have sex with a man, but if it’s not necessary I don’t want to have to take a lot of drugs, or injections. And, if I have to have any procedures or anything like that, I’d prefer to have you do them.  _ Personally _ . Betty told me that you’re the best at what you do, but I know sometimes doctors make decisions and then someone else does the work, and I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to try this again. It must cost a lot.”

“No,” Bill said softly, “not this isn’t going to cost you a lot. There will be a fee for acquiring the sperm if you chose to use a sperm bank, but you will not be charged for my time or any testing that can be done here at the office.”

Betty’s eyes were rimmed pink and Helen looked as if she had been slapped.

“That’s fantastic,” Helen gasped. And then she rushed ahead with, “he’s not at all like you said,” to Betty. 

Betty laughed and leaned forward to drag her wife into a quick kiss. Her hand was curved around Helen’s face, and Helen was whispering: “we’re going to have a baby.”

Bill cleared his throat and flipped open the folder in front of him. “Well, before we can determine what sort of testing, if any, we need to perform, there are some questionnaires that you will need to fill out. There will also be a physical exam that we could do today, or you can schedule for another day.”

Betty dragged the folder across the table and handed Helen a pen. They were reading over it together, whispering answers into each other’s ears. Bill was useless to them, left to sit and watch (and wonder, maybe, why he’d never been so happy).

\--

The conversation had started with, “Why are you awake?” He hadn’t even bothered to say hello, and why would he? It was eight in the morning for him, he was barely awake enough to think up words to say at all. But at least it was close to an acceptable time to receive a phone call, standing at the counter in his kitchen, contemplating the contents of his cabinets.

Where Bill was, it was well past dark (at least). So late at night, it must have been early in the morning, and any respectable person would have been sleeping. But Bill Masters must not have considered himself respectable. 

“Did you know your accent gets harder to understand when you’re tired?”

“I’m not tired,” Hardy objected. He turned away from the hopeless endeavor of finding food he wanted to eat. “Why are you awake?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Bill said. “If you’d prefer I didn’t call, I could hang up. It just seemed like making a phone call would be less work than texting you.”

Hardy hummed at that, working out if he wanted to continue demanding why the man couldn’t sleep or encourage him to call whenever the mood struck him. “Well, you’ve already called. No sense in hanging up now.” He was leaning back against the countertop now, hyper aware of the state of his kitchen. It didn’t matter to the man who couldn’t see it, but the poor state that Hardy had left it in made him feel self-conscious. “Did you want to talk about why you can’t sleep?”

“No. I was hoping you’d have something more interesting to talk about than my insomnia.”

“Why do I have to make the conversation?” Hardy asked. “If you call someone, you should have something to say.”

“We could talk about your medical condition,” Bill offered.

“We could talk about your work conditions,” Hardy retorted.

Bill growled into the phone, like a man that had to sit up in bed because the person on the other end of the phone was being  _ annoying _ . You could hear it in the effort of his breath, how he was preparing himself for a proper fight. You couldn’t express your annoyance while laying down. You needed to be upright for that sort of thing. 

“Fine,” Hardy said before Bill had a chance to speak, “I don’t have anything to talk about. Do you celebrate Christmas?”

“No. Let’s not talk about Christmas,” Bill said. “What time is it for you? Shouldn’t you be eating breakfast?”

“I refuse to be lectured about my eating habits by another person.” (Now that he’d struck up a decent exchange of texts with Miller, he was already being harangued about making sure he had enough to eat.) “There must be something that we can talk about.”

“Have you purchased anymore shirts since I saw you? Still wearing the same two identical blue ones?”

Hardy sighed. “I will hang up.”

Bill was laughing at him, but at least it was a soft sound. “Fine, how is your case going? I remember you mentioned that you’re going to have Ellie look it over and see if she could find something you’ve missed. Did she come and do that?”

“Miller’s had a look. Probably won’t make any progress on it until the holidays are over. She’s got kids, you know? Young kids. Fred’s barely walking.”

“What kind of gifts do you get for a child that young? I’ve always been bad at gifts.”

“Why would I get him a gift?” Hardy asked. He hadn’t even considered that he might be required to give Fred a present. There had been no talk of exchanging gifts. He didn’t expect Miller to think of him while she was shopping. “Should I get him a gift? Do people do that? Give gifts to their friend’s children?”

Bill’s silence was a contemplation of how best to respond. He’d been struck dumb by the question, but he didn’t sound as exasperated as Miller would have when he finally spoke. “Yes, I believe it’s something nice that you could do. I don’t know if you  _ have _ to. Seems like your partner could use an extra bit of niceness this year.”

“What do you get a child that young? What do you buy for a boy? I’ve never had a boy.” He pushed away from the countertop to find somewhere more comfortable to continue the conversation. He’d planned to make his way to the couch, but he ended up laying in bed instead. 

Bill was shrugging on his end, “blocks? Cars? I remember Libby bought Johnny a good deal of dinosaurs one year. He was very into them. But Howie didn’t seem to care for them.”

They sank into a conversation about nothing. They talked about toys, and stupid things they’d done as boys. They talked about Christmas songs they hated, and the relative disgustingness of eggnog until Bill was yawning into every word.

“I think you should sleep now,” Hardy said, but he didn’t want to. He could have talked longer; he could have soaked up the sound of Bill complaining about his (former) Mother in law’s vindictive fruitcakes for so much longer. 

“I should,” Bill agreed, and maybe it was only imagination that made it sound like he was sad to go. “You should be the one to call next,” he said, like saying:  _ don’t make me put in all the effort _ .

Hardy was smiling to himself, hand pressed to his quickening heart beating in his chest. He said, “I will. Sleep well, Bill.”

“Have a good day, Alec,” was the answer, and the regretful sound of the call disconnecting.


	9. Chapter 9

Betty had a peculiar way of simply existing in spaces that she hadn’t been present in a moment ago. Bill had only just looked down at the growing stack of papers awaiting his attention for a single moment. Just barely long enough to lift up the first resume on the massive stack of possible assistants before he dropped it again and fell back into his chair in defeat.

“Hard day?” Betty asked as if she’d been there since he walked in. As if she hadn’t just materialized there with a tablet resting in the crook of her arm as she eyed him with some dismay. 

He gasped, _ “Betty_!” Because she surprised him. But he just glared hatefully at the pile of resumes because there was no defense for his desperate disinterest in going through them. “I assume you’re here on official business.”

“Sure am,” she assured him, “but, in this case, I was sent by my real boss. My wife.” She nodded her head in that way that assumed he understood. And then she cleared her throat to go ahead with, “well, she’s decided that we’re inviting you to Christmas dinner. I don’t know what’s happening with your family, or if you’ve got someplace else you’d rather be. But if your only options are eating some uninspired ham steaks and pre packaged mashed potatoes with a couple of lesbians or sitting alone in your apartment waiting for a text from your overseas loverboy, well--” 

“I don’t have a loverboy.”

“You can always eat the ham at our house _and _ wait on the texts. And sing carols with us. We might even make a stocking for you.”

Bill had not even gone through the pretense of purchasing a Christmas tree for his poorly furnished little apartment. He hadn’t turned on the radio in his car in weeks for fear of having to listen to the same merry songs over and over again. Christmas had only ever been something that wound up his guts into a fist of apprehension. Libby had been filled from top to toes with warm memories of long holiday seasons with her family. She hummed carols as she hung stockings and she laid against his side daydreaming about little fat babies to make her Christmad dreams come true.

But Bill’s memory of Christmas was an echo of every other day. His Mother made some attempt, and they assembled for dinner like waiting for a bomb to explode. Father was unforgiving and Mother was skittish. The only presents Bill remembered receiving were black eyes and bruises.

And yet, every year, he’d been sent out into the world with this expectation that he must know how to choose a gift worth giving. He’d suffered through all the Christmas movies, he’d listened to all the chatter. He’d received more than his share of gifts from thankful families and co-workers and friends. And still, he stood in department stores like an idiot, hoping to be saved by someone who took pity on men who barely had an idea of what they were doing there.

“Oh,” he said when the silence had dragged too long and Betty’s amusement had started softening to real concern. “I--uh, that’s very thoughtful of you, Betty.”

“So I’ll tell her to expect you.” Betty wasn’t asking him. She wasn’t even letting him work out how to turn her down. No, she was looking at him the way she had when she handed him a coat and a plane ticket. There would be no arguing with her. “We shouldn’t disappoint Helen right now. She needs to be in top condition for conceiving.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Right. We can’t upset Helen.” He cleared his throat, “should I bring anything? What should I bring--I… Libby usually handled these things.”

“Baby steps, boss. Bring some wine and yourself. We’ll take care of the rest.” Then she smiled at him (or tried her best) and turned with a swish of her skirt. She pulled the door closed behind her and lingered for just a breath before she walked away.

\--

His primary consolation was that, while this had been a stupid idea, at least it had not been _ his _ stupid idea. A lucky follow up was how the aisle was filled with other similarly lost looking individuals staring at a selection of brightly colored baby toys without any clue which would be the best gift. At least Hardy didn’t have to look like an idiot by himself. 

All of the boxes seemed to offer some guidance as to the appropriateness to the age of the child. Fred was a baby, but his exact age was unknown. He was old enough to stand up on his own but he wasn’t old enough to talk. (And it had been a very long time since Daisy had learned to talk. So long ago now that he didn’t remember when it happened.) Still, that wasn’t as big a problem as the fact that he couldn’t begin to guess what sort of color, character or type Fred would prefer.

(He seemed to very much enjoy knocking over block towers. And sucking his thumb.)

Hardy had never bought a gift for another person’s child, but he also felt as if some consideration was meant to be given for what Miller would prefer. 

Surely, nobody had ever gone wrong with buying brightly colored, age-appropriate cars for a child? That’s what he’d been telling himself when he picked the box up. He just had been failing to believe it for the past five minutes or so. Because there were also dinosaurs that roared and trains and blocks made noises when you stacked them. And electronic toys that promised to teach letters and numbers. 

An educational gift seemed ideal, unless it implied that he didn’t feel like Miller was educating her child appropriately. 

Hardy was still holding the cars in one hand as he dug his phone out of his pocket. He stared at his sparse contact list as he tried to work out who he could call for help. Miller was an obvious choice but he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. (They hadn’t, after all, discussed anything at all about exchanging gifts or the impending holiday.) It was too early to call Bill (and he was useless anyway). Daisy would be at school. He sighed at himself, and the toys, and his phone, and the world, but he still tapped on Tess’ name.

She answered on the third ring, sounding almost amused enough to cover her confusion. “Should I feel special?”

“How should I know?” Hardy answered, and he squeezed his eyes shut at the flutter of his heart beat getting light and flighty. He cleared his throat, “I was calling for advice about a kid’s present.”

“Ok,” Tess said, “whose kid?”

“A co-worker’s.”

“A lady co-worker?”

“_Tess_,” Hardy said. He opened his eyes and dropped the box he’d been holding back on the shelf. “If you can’t help…”

“Calm down, Alec. Boy or girl? How old?” 

The conversation was so polite it was almost professional. Tess directed him to fat little cars that made noises and came with track pieces. And when that gift had been secured, her voice was soft when she said, “this might be the most civil conversation we’ve had in years, Alec. It’s nice to hear you sound almost happy.”

Hardy was resting one arm against a shelf, frowning sideways at nothing at all, thinking terrible-and-unkind things about his wife. He could have said nothing at all, but he said, “I’ve been happy, Tess. You just don’t get to know about it.” 

Her silence was shock.

“Thank you for your help,” he said when he couldn’t take the sound of her breathing one more second. He hung up before she recovered; his body felt flushed hot and he took a minute to steady himself before he trusted his feet to carry him.

\--

Bill was making dinner, and Alec was staying up very-very late. 

“What have you been eating?” was Alec’s voice wrapped up in a blanket on his bed. It was shadowed in the after-midnight dark; just now starting to get heavy with sleepiness. “Microwave food?”

“I haven’t had to cook for myself in a very long time. And besides,” he said, off to the side of the stove, where his phone was propped up on a glass container. “It’s oddly difficult to make enough food for just one person. I don’t even know how to shop. I bought six chicken breasts when I went to the store, what am I going to do with six chicken breasts?”

“Eat six meals?”

“The only food packaged with a single person in mind _ is _ microwave meals.”

Alec made a noise like a wheeze, a snort of disbelief, and disapproval and amusement all at once. His voice was stretching and settling into a new place as he said, “and you call yourself a doctor.”

“Yes yes.” Bill moved the pan off the hot burner and picked his phone up to take it off speakerphone. Their conversation was yawning itself to a close and there was something far more fulfilling about talking quietly into the phone. “You don’t have to stay up so late,” he said.

“I know I don’t,” Alec agreed. He was quiet, like thinking very carefully about what he wanted to say next.

“Betty said you were my _l__over boy_,” he tried to make it sound like it had been funny. He tried to make it a _ tease_, like it was every bit as silly of her to think such a thing as the people from Broadchurch had been to think they were a couple. It had been funny at the start, when they were building a friendship off appreciation for how silly it was. 

But here they were, breathing into a phone call where neither of them wanted to talk first. Here they were with phones full of long text messages and half-whispered admissions. Here he was, with his heartbeat pounding in his chest, biting his lip, hoping and not hoping all at once for some kind of reaction that--

What?

What the hell did he want?

What the hell was he even doing?

Waiting on a man from Broadchurch to tell him that maybe Betty had a point. That maybe if you woke up looking for a message from the man, and fell asleep thinking about what you’d talk about tomorrow, and stole moments from your day to escape into the ease of another nonsense conversation with him.

Alec’s sigh was almost wounded. He said, “tell me something. Something that you couldn’t tell your wife.”

Bill was staring at his socked feet and his floor that desperately needed to be swept. He was churning over a thousand different things in his head, all the ugliest secrets he’d ever kept. He was wondering what sort of test this could possibly be, and how _terrified _ he suddenly found himself to be. He said, “I never loved Libby. Before I met her, I… I _ was _ in love. I loved her and I thought, I _thought _ she loved me but I wrote her a note asking her to marry me and…” His throat was squeezing his words out of shape, his face was filling up with heat. Bill pressed a hand across his mouth and then cleared his throat. “It didn’t work out. And I married Libby because I needed a wife and I thought I liked her well enough.”

The silence stretched, and the quiet moved through the phone. Alec must have been pushing himself up to sit on the bed. He said, “did you love Virginia?”

“Yes,” Bill whispered, “but I wasn’t kind to her.”

“I loved my wife,” Alec said, “and that wasn’t enough for her. I don’t want to not be enough for someone again.”

“I want to be happy with someone. I want to know that I’m loved, I want them to know that I love them,” Bill said, because he couldn’t say that he didn’t want to be _ here_. He didn’t want this lonely little apartment. He didn’t want the office waiting for me at his job. He didn’t want any of the things he’d spent his whole life trying to get. Whatever they had meant to him before, whatever franticness had driven him to such heights all these years, it wasn’t in him anymore. 

It was stupid, to be standing in his kitchen, hoping that a man an ocean away from him would _understand_. 

Alec said, “don’t make it sound so impossible, Bill. You can have that if you work for it.”

Maybe it was how late it was where Alec was. Or maybe it was how lonely Bill felt just then, but those words sounded almost like a promise.

Then Alec said, “go to Betty’s for Christmas. It’ll be better than being alone. And go eat your dinner, the food’s got to be cold by now.”

“Yeah,” Bill agreed.

“Tomorrow, we’ve got to have an earlier call. It’s one in the morning.”

Bill snorted. “Sleep well, Alec.”

“Enjoy your dinner,” Alec said. 

They were idiots on the phone, wasting seconds, waiting and waiting to see if they had to be the first one to hang up. Bill moved first, because just then he wasn’t sure he could bear to hear the sound of the call disconnecting from the other end. He stood in his kitchen, feeling like his skin had been peeled away from his flesh, with something like a flicker of hope resting firmly in his chest.

\--

Hardy woke up like a man with a hangover. The night before had been no less full of rash decisions just because it lacked enough alcohol to justify them. His body felt no less abused. Exhaustion settled into his limbs like filling all his insides up with warm sand. The morning sun mocked him through the window as he lay on his back, searching for some sense of purpose big enough to drag him out of his bed.

Sitting no more than an arm’s distance away was the instrument of his own stupidity. (Just the memory of it made him press both his hands to his face with a groan that shook through his whole body.) The _boldness _ of asking Bill for secrets he’d never shared with anyone else. The agony of laying in this very bed with both his hands wrapped around the phone, waiting for a response he had no right to expect.

But he’d gotten one.

Oh _ hell._

Staying beneath the blankets, far from the phone and all the damage it could inflict on his well-being, seemed like the only good, logical decision that could be made. A smart man would have walked away, but Hardy was a shaky, weak-hearted sort. He grabbed the phone almost as soon as he’d decided he shouldn’t, and there was a text waiting for him.

Bill had sent it before bed, and all it said was: **_Good morning_**, ** _Alec_**.

The text could have said anything at all and Hardy would have smiled. It was a response made of reflex, a steadily growing expectation that was as essential to the mood of his morning as a good cup of tea. It held him over through the morning quiet as he went about the mundane activities of his life. Just when the softness of a good morning text was waning, Bill showed up with a complaint about his coffee, or his office, or the unnecessary (his words) amount of paperwork waiting for him. 

With the way they were carrying on, late evening phone calls were going to become as much a part of his day as good morning texts. He was going to rearrange dinner and bedtime to make a space to answer the phone to the slowly brightening sound of Bill Masters fumbling his way into a conversation. It was a wonder how a man could dial a phone, and wait for it to ring and breathe _hello _ across the ocean and _till _ have no idea what you meant to say. But Hardy _did _ understand why it didn’t matter to him if they talked about the mind-numbing nothings of a day, or exchanged dinner plans, or their least favorite holiday songs. Hardy would have had a conversation about anything at all--

His boldness was self-preservation because _he _ knew. He’d been here before, spending all his time waiting on texts and phone calls. Falling asleep and waking up thinking about what he was going to say the next time. Taking showers without washing his hair, replaying all the words on repeat.

Hardy had to _live _ with the answers he’d been given now. He had to accept life in the aftermath because Bill had barely taken a full minute to come up with an answer, almost exactly like a promise. 

So he was an idiot, falling in love with a man he had no hope of being with, smiling at his phone as he typed out: **_Good morning, Bill._ **

\--

Bill was wearing the lab coat because he’d convinced himself that he was going to do something like real work today. There was enough of it waiting to be attended to that he shouldn’t have had trouble finding something to throw himself into. He’d convinced himself that it would be better than sorting through resumes, but that had been well over a half an hour ago and all he’d managed to do was find himself staring at the nicely-made bad in the observation room.

His head was full of thoughts that he couldn’t _ quite _ hear. It was a peculiar feeling to be caught inside your own body, knowing something was going on, and being just out of earshot of your own emotions. (Or not. Maybe Bill _felt _ plenty. It was the ideas he couldn’t get a grip on.)

“Bill.” Virginia was standing in the doorway, one hand resting against the frame and the other behind her back. Her voice was as soft as flower petals; her face as gentle as early-morning sunshine. 

“Virginia.” He didn’t even have a pretense of being caught preparing because he hadn’t even made it as far as pulling a chair out. The most he’d done was turn on a light. They’d built this room to contain any noise and it covered the space around them cotton, sealing away all the world around them. 

“I appreciate that you’ve gone out of your way to make my return as smooth as possible,” she said. “I just wonder if… How are you?”

Oh, he was thinking about a beautiful woman named Dody that had whispered his name from kiss-pinked lips like she _loved _ him. He was wondering where she was, and why he hadn’t been enough for her. 

Is that what he was wondering?

That’s what Alec had said. That he had loved his wife, and he hadn’t been enough for her. Bill had loved Dody like that, he had dreamed about the life they could have. Oh hell, he’d even imagined a lovely little house, and a little dog, and when they were ready, a child with the face of the woman he loved. He could imagine happiness in Dody’s image because it had _ felt _ possible.

Libby begged for children, and she’d gotten them in the end. Bill had never imagined a life full of children with Libby. He’d never dreamed of Christmas carols and little stockings by the fire. He couldn’t imagine kissing her in the morning with an arm wound around her back. He hadn’t even loved his children with any hope, because he had never felt that he _ could_.

That was the sort of bastard his father had made him to be; the one that hadn’t even tried to love his own children. And for what reason? Because he hadn’t wanted them? 

(But didn’t he? It had felt like heartbreak in that God-damn operating room, with the weight of his stillborn daughter in his hands. It had felt like his soul had been ripped. You couldn’t break a heart that couldn’t love. He had _loved _ Catherine. He must have loved Johnny, and Jenny, and Howie.)

“Fine,” Bill said, “I’m doing well. Thank you.”

“Things don’t have to be strange between us,” Virginia said. “We’ve always been able to separate our work from other…distractions. I hope that we’re able to find that same balance again.”

“Of course,” he cleared his throat, “right. Of course. I just--” he looked down at the tablet in his hand, and then at the door behind her. “I think I’m not feeling well, if you excuse me. I’m going to take some paperwork and go home.”

Virginia looked, if only for a moment, disappointed by him. As if she had expected something different. 

Bill slid past her before he could get caught on wondering why she would look at him like that. He passed Betty in the hallway, and she didn’t even try to stop him. The most she did was frown back down the hall like she already knew what she’d find. 

But it wasn’t Virginia’s fault that Bill didn’t know what the hell he wanted. It wasn’t her fault that he’d made this terrible situation. It wasn’t her fault that he wanted to be anywhere in the world but _here_.

Impulse stopped him at the last moment. And it felt very much like it had the night before. When he was asked for honesty and he had barely hesitated. It must have been all those thoughts of his, just slightly too far away to hear clearly. He called, “Betty?”

“Yeah?” Betty was torn between following him and continuing what she had been doing.

“I’m going home for the day,” was a coward’s way out. He didn’t look away from her trying to figure out what to say in response, so they were still staring at each other when he cleared his throat to add, “and I’d be very happy to accept your invitation.”

\--

“What is that?” Miller had barely made it in the door. Her fingers were still reaching up to pull her scarf loose. Even poor Fred was still bundled so tightly in his winter wear that he couldn’t quite manage to lower his arms. 

Hardy had left the gift sitting on the table by the stack of case files that they kept thinking they were going to get to. But the white-shocked-look on Miller’s face made him think that perhaps he should have tucked it out of sight until he’d had the chance to provide some lead-in to giving it to her. (Except that Hardy had never seen the sense in pretenses. People wasted altogether too much time on nonsense.) “It’s for Fred,” he said. And it sounded _immediately _ stupid to him. “For Christmas. I wasn’t sure-- If it’s inappropriat--”

“Oh shut up,” Miller said. Her fingers were still curled into the scarf but she hadn’t managed to pull it loose yet. The words came as one gust of breath and she jerked to the side, spinning around so she wasn’t looking at him. 

Fred looked back at his Mom and then up at Hardy. His overstuffed coat sleeves were keeping his arms straight out to the sides but he raised them vaguely toward him. “Off,” the boy said to him. (Or might have been up.) 

Hardy could have taken the boy’s coat off but he couldn’t be sure that Miller was going to stay. As much trouble as he appeared to be in, it would just be made worse by removing the coat of a small child that most likely wouldn’t want it put back on. “Miller,” he said.

“Shut up,” Miller repeated but her voice was tight and wet. She turned back to look at him as she wiped at the tears gathering at the edges of her eyes. “What do you think you’re doing?”

There he was, a fully grown man, ducking his head because the truth was that he didn’t know what he thought he was doing. “That’s what friends do, isn’t it? You’ve got a kid and we’re friends, and that means I buy him a present and--”

“Oh, _shut up_,” Miller shouted at him. She was scrubbing fresh tears from her eyes with greater aggravation. Poor Fred, who had really reached the end of his ability to be held prisoner in his coat, started crying at the sharpness in her voice. Miller pulled her own scarf off before she crouched down to release the boy and kiss his distressed little forehead. 

“I can take it back,” Hardy offered.

“Don’t you dare,” Miller snapped. She dropped Fred’s coat on the back of his little couch and pulled her own coat off. “I don’t think Tom’s coming home for Christmas. He says that he needs space and he feels happier when he’s not around me. He says he didn’t want to leave Broadchurch and he doesn’t want to be punished because of me.” 

Hardy was miserable with comfort, standing there without any ability to offer anything that might make the thick-wet pain in Miller’s voice even slightly more bearable.

“I didn’t do this, did I? I didn’t murder a boy. I didn’t make us pariahs in our own home. I didn’t-- I haven’t even put up a tree. Fred’s too young to care. I haven’t even thought about making dinner. I didn’t even wrap any gifts. I don’t… I didn’t think I could stand it.”

Hardy looked over at the little boy dragging his box of blocks off the bottom of a low shelf. “We could get a tree,” Hardy said. “I haven’t gotten one because-- What’s the point? Daisy’s visiting her Grandparents with her Mom. I won’t get to see her until New Years, if she agrees to see me at all. We could…” He shrugged, “we could eat. Let Fred open his gifts.”

Miller was shaking her head at him. “You’re a bastard,” she said. And then she cleared her throat again. “Look at me, I’m a mess. I’m going to make myself presentable. And then we’ll talk about trees and dinner and…” She moved like she was going toward the bathroom but she lurched back and dragged Hardy into a hug.

He was too shocked to do more than stand there, and it didn’t seem to matter if he reciprocated or not. She held on a matter of seconds and then let go to retreat to the bathroom. Hardy was left standing there, looking at the empty space where Miller had been until Fred climbed onto the back of the couch to grab his hand.

“Blocks,” the boy said to him.

They were building their sixth tower before Miller came back out, and when she did, her composure was a worn-thin cover barely hiding her pink-tipped nose. She didn’t bother to touch the case files, just came around the couch to sit on the floor with them. “If you were sincere, and you weren’t just offering because I was making a scene, we’d be very happy to have Christmas here with you.”

Hardy nodded, and Miller reached out to wrap an arm around Fred and drag him back up against her body. She kissed his fluffy hair as he wriggled to be free enough to kick over the block tower. “You’ll have to do the cooking if you want something edible,” Hardy said.

Miller snorted. “We’ll split it down the middle. Joe always made Christmas dinner.”

“We can buy premade,” Hardy suggested.

They were idiots, trying to find something like happiness, smiling at nothing.

\--

Betty opened the door with a jerk that made the knob rattle. He’d expected some level of formal attire; most likely something very similar to what they frequently wore to work. But Betty was wearing a baggy T-shirt over a pair of leggings patterned with Christmas tree lights. Her hair was pulled away from her face by a wide-black headband and she smiled at him with fondness that had no name.

“Oh,” Bill said. He was wearing a _tie _ and carrying a bottle of wine (as directed). “Did I come at the wrong time?”

“Is that the pizz--oh.” Helen was all smiles in baggy fleece pajamas zipped from her waist to her neck. She had a fist full of cash and an almost embarrassed smile. “Hello Dr. Masters.”

“Just Bill will do,” Betty said. She opened the door as wide as she could and motioned for him to step inside. “No, you came at the right time, boss. We just decided that we’d take it easy on you this year. We ordered pizza, we bought beer and we’re going to watch Christmas movies.”

“Betty.” He didn’t step inside because he was wearing a suit. He was wearing a _ tie_. He was holding a bottle of wine that certainly cost more than all the pizza and beer combined. There was every indication available that he didn’t belong _ here_. He’d misunderstood the invitation, and he wouldn’t _ fit_. “I think it’s best if I just…”

“Look,” Betty said as she leaned against the door. “No offense to your fancy education and all, boss but I think you might be the least qualified person standing in this doorway to decide what is and isn’t in your own best interest. Now, I thought something like this would happen so I took the liberty of making sure we had some pajamas in your size.” 

“No, really, I think…” He took a step back and Helen turned in an awkward circle on her heels to duck back through the doorway she’d come through. 

Betty slid forward, so she close enough she could grab him by the hand if she wanted. She was leaning against the door jamb, giving him just enough space to make a run for it. “I’m offering you a night of pizza, beer, pajamas and no expectations. Nobody wants to be alone on Christmas, not even you. And besides,” was a light and happy tilt to her voice, “they’re great pajamas. You can send a selfie to your Scottish sweetheart.”

“He’s not…”

But Betty just hiked up an eyebrow at him, daring him to finish the sentence. She was _ daring _ him to call her a liar, and he just couldn’t find the words for it.

“Well,” he shifted on his feet, “I brought wine.”

Betty’s smile was beautiful, and it glowed like the sun. (And he thought, like an answer to all those things that he couldn’t quite figure out, that this is what love must look like. Love at it’s most sincere, and least selfish. Because Betty had nothing to gain from loving him, and still she dragged him into her home just so he wouldn’t be alone.)

\--

Fred fell asleep first, face down in the left over bits of wrapping paper with his fingers curled around one of the noisy little cars Hardy had bought him. He was still wearing the pajamas he’d woken up in and the little white stars caught the twinkle of the Christmas tree lights. 

“God, I wish I could fall asleep anywhere like that,” Miller said. She was curled up on the edge of the couch, sipping another mug of just enough eggnog to be an excuse for the alcohol she’d put in it. “Do you remember what it was like to be that unbothered by everything?”

Hardy snorted. “Does anyone?”

They’d had a slow-and-lazy day, drifting through every emotion a human could feel in a day. The morning had started later than he remembered any Christmas involving Daisy had. Fred had found the gifts by the tree, but he was happy enough to get something to eat before he tore into them. Miller had spent an hour in the bathroom crying her eyes out, and they’d put together race tracks and installed batteries until all the toys finally worked. 

They’d eaten lunch while they watched kids cartoons off a laptop.

“You’re a pretty good guy, Alec Hardy,” Miller said because she’d had just enough alcohol to make her think the words were a good idea. “Still a shitface. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile--well, I saw you smile, but you didn’t smile at me. You were smiling at your phone.”

Alec was smiling at a stupid picture of Bill Masters wearing fluffy gray pajamas and an elf hat, squished between two smiling women on a small couch. He was smiling because Bill was _ smiling_, even if it was twinged with embarrassment. “I smile,” he said, “when there’s something to be smiling about. What have I got to smile about? My heart is trying to kill me. I can’t drive. I can’t work. I can barely walk some days. And if I die before I solve Sandbrook, all I’ll ever be known for is fucking up an investigation that let a child murderer go free.”

Miller took another drink. She shrugged, “you were smiling at your phone. I saw you. I watched you play with Fred today. You’ve got things to smile about. We both have. Now, don’t start with all that depressing stuff. I’m trying to be a merry drunk.” Her smile was exhausted and her cheeks were pink.

“Fine,” he said.

“Fine,” Miller answered with a smile.


	10. Chapter 10

_**Happy New Year, Bill**_.

Bill could have quibbled over time zones and technicalities. It had long been his first and most bitter instinct to demand precision. He had clung to an idea that being precise, being _correct_ made him _better_. But, he was coming to realize, leaning over a sorry attempt at dinner poured out of a saucepan and into a cereal bowl, that all his ceaseless demands had only ever made him unhappy.

_**Send me a photo from the future**_**, **Bill said because he was making these little choices. Maybe dinner was poured from a freezer bag into a pan and tasted processed and overcooked. Maybe he was holding his breath waiting to see if this was a request too outrageous to be granted. Maybe his heart was beating in his chest in a way that he couldn’t _deny_ and maybe for the first time in so long he could hardly remember the name for it, he was almost _giddy_. 

He was wrapped up in hope. He was whistling to himself in the shower. He had nobody to answer to; he had nothing to hide. 

And he had Alec, who texted him a disgruntled sort of, _**give me a minute, I’m not fit to be seen**_**.**

**_That’s nonsense_, **Bill answered without thinking. It was such an instinctive reaction that it was almost a surprise. It wasn’t that he hadn’t learned from his marriage that you were always expected to affirm or deny these sort of trivial image issues. He had assured Libby by rote, repeating the words she’d taught him she wanted to hear. But he’d barely glanced at the dress making her fat or the color that rendered her pale. He hadn’t _meant_ it. But here, leaning his elbows against the counter, staring at the phone screen, he _did_.

He meant something like: don’t change a single thing. He meant: show me what you look like when nobody else is there to see. 

Alec’s answer was delayed, the time dragged. Maybe it was asking too much for such a candid photo. Or perhaps Alec had changed his mind entirely. 

Or maybe he only needed time to craft the words: _**Fine, but you asked for it.**_

And the photo that came through next was exactly the image of a man that hadn’t done a single thing to improve his appearance. He was already in bed, with the rumpled covers pulled up to his throat. His beard and his hair were a mess, looking divinely ungroomed. He was _tired_ and it showed it on his face, but there was a glint of hope in that awkward half-smile he spared for his phone. One of the pillows to his left was missing a pillowcase and there was a glass of something left half finished on the table by his bed. But it was _Alec_, without any pretense, filters or alterations. 

(Oh _God_ what was Bill going to do with himself? What the _hell_ was he supposed to say now?)

_**Oh hush, you’re naturally handsome. **_And maybe, _**but go to sleep, you look like hell.**_

\--

It had been a week (give or take) since New Year’s (not that Hardy was keeping track of time based solely on how long it had been since he had been foolish enough to send a photo of himself to Bill) and he still hadn’t gotten enough sleep to stop looking (as Bill put it) like hell. He could feel the weight of exhaustion like a crushing weight, slowly and steadily pulling his body into the ground. Every action required more effort than he wanted to be forced into giving. But the alternative was to lay very still until he died.

Maybe that might not have seemed like such an outrageous idea about six months ago when the only reason he was still living was because he wasn’t quite dying. Now that he was on the other side of a worsening heart problem, he found himself in the ridiculous position of having more will to live than he started with and less energy to accomplish even the smallest tasks.

Miller must have noticed as soon as she stepped into his house, because she hadn’t stopped staring at him with a pinched frown on her face and her fingers picking up and dropping the same pen. She was _saying_, “I just don’t know that we have a compelling enough reason to reopen this case.” 

But what she wasn’t saying was probably something like, _Christ are you going to keel over right here in front of me, what the fuck am I supposed to do if you do?_

“What resources do we have if we don’t?” Hardy asked. 

“Me,” Miller said just before she narrowly escaped being hit with a pillow.

Fred was on the couch because they had been hopeful that he might quietly remain there if he had something to watch. However, he had discovered that throwing pillows over the back of the couch was vastly more interesting than the video Miller had picked for him. Every time he threw it, Miller picked it up and tossed it back. When she took a half-breath too long to do it, Fred screamed to remind her. 

It gave Hardy the time to think through how exactly he could phrase, yes and you’re wonderful but there we have limited or no access to files and databases and other useful things that could help _us_ solve this case. 

“Oh stop,” Miller said before he could get a word out, “stop making that face. Don’t sit there and act like I’m being unreasonable. You’re the one that’s saying that we ought to go and see your ex-wife to ask her if she could please reopen the case. Your _ex-wife_, sir. I can count on no fingers the number of times it was a good idea to go to your ex-anything asking for a favor. How about you ask _Bill_ what he thinks of this genius idea?”

Well, Bill was working with his ex-affair and had only just recently had sex with his ex-wife. So, his opinion on the matter would likely line up Hardy’s. “We could try, Miller. If she refuses, then we continue on, but if she agrees? It’ll be that much easier.”

“And you’ll be in debt to your ex,” Miller said, “that’s not a position any sane man wants to be. But fine. _Fine_. If it’s so important to you. But if we’re going to all that trouble, we should have a plan for when it doesn’t work out. No sense in making the drive for no reason.”

Fred’s pillow smacked into Hardy’s arm and fell to the ground. The boy giggled hysterically as he ducked down on the couch so he couldn’t be seen. “Fine,” Hardy said. Then he picked the pillow up to throw it back at the boy.

\--

Bill’s intention had been to sort through the stacks of applications that had responded to the job posting. He was supposed to have a short list of candidates to compare with Virginia’s by Friday. They had agreed on the date in the hallway, as he was on his way out (early) and she was on her way to meet with a client. It was her idea to compare so they didn’t end up trying to hire the same employee, but Bill felt that after all these years the likelihood they would be looking for the same things were almost non-existent. 

Still, better safe than sorry.

Bill wasn’t sorry that Betty had invited herself to wait in his office. He was willing to seize on any excuse to keep from having to sort through the pile that presented itself. He had thought it would be a series of texts from Alec that distracted him (or, he’d _hoped_). 

“Are you nervous?” Bill asked.

Betty had been cleaning under her fingernails since she sat down in the chair on the other side of his desk. As far as he could tell there was nothing under her fingernails (maybe not even skin at this point) but she kept picking. “No,” she said without pause, “why would I be nervous? There’s nothing to be nervous about. It’s a glorified turkey baster,” she said like that was the point, “it’s nothing.”

“I did suggest you take the whole day off.”

“And I appreciate that, boss, but unless I’m mistaken, babies cost money.” She slapped her hands into her lap like she was fed up with herself. No matter how long she’d been staring at the door, Helen had not materialized. (Most likely due to the fact the appointment was not for another half-an-hour, and even if she showed up then she’d still be early.) “Talk about something,” Betty demanded.

“Well, what would be the most important thing to look for on these resumes?”

Betty sneered at him. “Talk about something _interesting_. I think we’ve established that this is not your area of expertise. You should have just asked Virginia to hire somebody for the both of you. I mean, what do you know about people?” 

Bill sighed. While that was _true_, it still wasn’t something that was generally said with such venom. Of course, Betty had always proven to be far more astute than he would have liked her to be, so there was no denying that she most likely had already decided that he just wasn’t interested in hiring someone. He didn’t mind the result, they could expand the business if they had more employees, but he didn’t want to have to worry about the _process_. 

Still.

“I’m sorry,” Betty said. And like it _pained_ her to say, “I may be more nervous than I thought.”

“It’s perfectly normal to be nervous before procedures.”

“You’re impregnating my wife. It’s a little more than a _procedure_ don’t you think?” 

Bill pulled his glasses off. He folded them shut and set them on top of the stack of papers he had barely gotten started on. “I wish you wouldn’t say it like that. It makes it sound like…”

Betty’s smile was so bright it was full of sunshine. She winked at him, “right, right. If you’re going to keep carrying on this long-distance gay affair you might need to stop being such a heteronormative prude. Although how a man who regularly watches people have sex and takes notes can be a prude, I do not know. Have you ever seen a penis--you know, recreationally?”

There were so many things inappropriate that he couldn’t exactly figure out what he wanted to address first. It must have been temporary insanity that left him saying, “I see my own penis almost everyday now, recreationally speaking.”

Betty’s first, immediate, loudest reaction was a quick indraw of breath through her nose that could _only_ be described as a snort. It must have been so startling to her that she choked on her own breath because the next sound was both a laugh and the wheeze of a dying man. Her normally composed and vaguely amused face turned pink as sunburn as she leaned forward and _bawled_ with laughter.

He’d never been the sort of man that laughed at his own jokes, but he couldn’t help it because Betty was gasping for breath as she slid forward across the chair with her hands slapping down on the top of his desk like she was trying to keep herself from landing on the floor. “It wasn’t that funny,” he said when her laughter finally went soft enough to let her breath. “Statistically…”

“No,” she said, “no, don’t ruin it with facts, boss.” She managed to get her body full upright again as she dabbed at the corners of her eyes with a tissue plucked from the box on his desk. The pinkness of her cheeks turned redder on her neck but it was already fading as she caught her breath. She mumbled, “recreationally speaking,” to herself.

Bill straightened his desk while he waited. There was nothing out of place enough to take much time to fix, so he found himself resting his hands one over the other while he waited. 

“Well,” Betty said once her voice was finally stable enough to hold her, “that’s good for you. Everyone should know their own bodies. But that wasn’t what I was asking.”

No, it wasn’t. “I have been interested in seeing other penises recreationally but _no_, aside from masturbating in the same room as other men I have not had the opportunity to act on that interest. And it is not a gay affair.”

“Is that because you don’t know how to have sex with a man?” Betty asked.

“That is a wildly inappropriate question.” For the workplace, in his office, with the door open, where anyone in the building could hear it being asked. The whole conversation had been inappropriate but it had skirted around outright asking the obvious. 

Betty was just shaking her head. “Well, there’s always hope that _he_ does. He can teach you how it goes. Isn’t that one of the predominant male fantasies? Getting it on with your teacher?” Her voice always took on a special quality when she was _enjoying_ making a fool of him. They’d known one another long enough that the meanness had gone out of it, but her delight at making him uncomfortable still lingered. “I could introduce you to some like-minded friends?”

“Betty!” 

Her smile was forgiving. “Right, right. Too far. But you do need to start thinking about things like that. There’s only so far you can string a man along before he starts expecting things. I should know.”

Bill wasn’t _stringing_ anyone along. (And he had, in fact, been thinking about these very things.) “Perhaps you should go wait for Helen out front?”

“Perhaps I should,” Betty agreed. 

\--

“I’m afraid I have to agree with Ellie.” Bill had only just barely gotten home from work. There was the occasional shift in his voice, an almost audible quality of uncertainty as he went about the process of loosening his tie and shirt buttons. “Unless you have an exceptionally good relationship with your ex, the politics of…” There it was again, a pinch in his voice. 

“I can’t see you,” Hardy said.

“What?” 

“What are you doing right now?”

Bill hesitated. Hardy already knew that he had just walked in the door when he called but the bowl he dropped his keys in made a clanging noise of metal-on-metal. He grunted when he toed his shoes off by the door (which was bad for them and Bill should know better). He sighed when he undid his tie and that almost certainly meant he had to be standing there trying to decide if it was risque to remove his shirt while on the phone. 

But Bill hesitated so hard that he put the phone on speaker so he could set it down. “I’m just standing here.”

Hardy knew _exactly_ why he was smiling but he couldn’t have put it into words. “You’re taking off your shirt.”

“What?” Bill demanded. “I am--how--what difference does that make? _You_ can’t see me. You said so yourself. And for that matter…” He stuttered there, like he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say next. This wasn’t a natural lull in a conversation and it wasn’t any sort of normal offended quiet that Bill liked to put on when he was trying to prove a point. No, this was finger-twisting uncertainty. “I mean,” he said almost shyly, “did you want to see me with my shirt off?”

It was after dark in Broadchurch and Hardy had been laying on his watching nonsense television off his laptop while he waited for Bill to call. Even doing nothing at all but laying there staring at the frozen face on his laptop screen, his heart started racing like he’d been running uphill. His arms started to buzz a bit and he took a breath through his nose like he could restore any sense of calm. 

It was one thing to acknowledge the obvious to himself and it was another thing _entirely_ to be asked so outright. To be asked without the pretense of teasing. Without an ounce of flirtation. Bill was _asking_; like he’d only just begun to realize that if they kept on with this it might lead to certain expectations. 

“When you’re ready to be seen with your shirt off,” Hardy said. 

Bill’s quiet was unreadable. He cleared his throat as the phone clattered a bit on his end, and his voice was close and private again. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I’ve been told that I have a certain magnetic quality that draws people to me. Sexually speaking.”

Hardy snorted at that, “oh yeah? Who told you that? One of your exes?”

“That’s not the point. But since you brought the subject up again, I would like it to be noted that I believe it’s a bad idea to go asking your ex-wife for a favor.”

“What is she going to do?” Hardy demanded, “refuse to reopen the case just to spite me? Children died, need I remind you? Any human with a soul would do what they could to find justice.”

“No, of course she wouldn’t.” The fridge door opened on his side, “I don’t know. What do I know? Maybe I just don’t like the idea of you going to see her.”

“Well if you are worried I’m going to follow your example, remember that I can’t even walk up three stairs without needing to sit, much less an entire flight of them. Now, unless you’ve got any _meaningful_ advice to offer me on the subject of how to approach an ex, I believe we should talk more about pictures of you with your shirt off.”

Bill snorted. “It’s not as exciting a sight as it once was. Although I have lost some weight now that I have to feed myself.”

Well, Bill might be more plump than he liked, but Hardy’s body was working itself down to just skin and bones. Used to be that he had a bit of cushion across his ribs and hip bones and it felt like every day he was discovering that his clothes were getting looser and the air was getting colder and harsher. “Remind me what sport you used to be involved in?”

“Boxing.”

“Right,” Hardy said. “Boxing.” He sighed as he closed the laptop and moved it to the side. He rolled onto his side with the phone pressed to his ear. “Well, come on then, you have to entertain me or I’ll fall asleep. What’s for _supper_ tonight?”

\--

Bill was not as prepared for meeting with Virginia as he had intended to be. Perhaps he’d put too much pressure on himself to be able to realistically read and sort through the potential clients. Almost the only employee he’d ever hired of his own free will had been Virginia and the decision to take her on as a secretary had been less about how capable she was and more about how beautiful she was. 

That hadn’t been his finest moment, but he did take encouragement in his ability to acknowledge that the decision had most definitely been as dependent on her figure as her qualifications.

Betty was right; Bill wasn’t good with people. This wasn’t a matter of being able to read people or interact with people. This was a matter of upholding the standards with which he had been running this business. Somewhere in the stack of applicants there was a person that had the same dedication as he did.

He’d even taken the whole stack home with him, full of the intention of talking it over with Alec. Bill couldn’t even work out, most days, if he was _happy_ in this place. If he wanted to continue on being _here_. If the work even mattered to him anymore. Alec didn’t change a damn bit of that but being a man rendered miserable by forces mostly beyond his control, he was uniquely capable of tackling only the problem that was presented directly to him. It didn’t matter to Alec that Bill was running out of ways to talk himself into going to work because the task wasn’t to convince Bill to love the job he had been obsessively chasing all his life.

(And for what? To have nothing to show for his life but the job? To have no home, to have no wife, to have no children that wanted to speak to him, to have no lover, to have almost no friends?)

Alec would have gotten rid of everything that didn’t matter and he wouldn’t have allowed Bill to wander in circles in his mind, picking out flaws and what-ifs and little worries. There was a job that needed doing and no matter how unpleasant it was, it had to be finished.

If Alec Hardy could find justice for murdered children; Bill could pick a goddamn replacement out of a stack of perfectly qualified applicants. And he had, very quickly, about twenty minutes before he walked into the conference room between Virginia’s office and his own. The one with all more windows and glass doors than walls. 

Virginia was sitting primly in her seat, scribbling a circle in the corner of her notepad as if she had been waiting for far longer than the two minutes it had taken him to work up the nerve to walk in here. Her smile was polite but not joyful when he cleared his throat at the door. “I wasn’t certain you were ready. I thought about sending Betty to ask if we were still meeting today.”

“I apologize for being late,” Bill said without even the faintest twitch of a smile. It felt, in that moment, and every single moment he was _here_ in this building that his life was teetering on the edge of a question he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask. “I’ve been thinking… You know, when I started all this, I think I _did_ genuinely believe in what we were doing. I think I thought I couldn’t be happy without it, that _I_ had to control every aspect of our research. And well, you’ve been an invaluable asset to me, to the research, to this company. It is absolutely necessary to say that _none_ of this could have happened if not for you. And that has--very recently--led me to the realization that I might be the least critical aspect for the continued success of this business.”

“Bill,” Virginia said softly, “what are you _saying_?”

“I’m saying I’ve found two candidates.”

Virginia was just _staring_ at him. Her nod was very slow, like she couldn’t quite understand what had been said to her. “I have as well.”

“I want to hire them both,” Bill said. He stepped close enough that when he set the folders down in front of her they didn’t slap rudely on the table top. “I’d like to transition into a strictly supervisory role.”

Virginia had lifted up the cover of one folder to look at the application but she dropped it again when he spoke. “Why?” she asked, “_Bill_, this whole thing--_all_ of this has _always_ been about the research, about your _single-minded_ pursuit to get _here_. Everything that has happened to _all_ of us, everything that we have done to each other, to everyone we’ve met, has been to create this clinic. To have the autonomy and the respect that we have _now_ and half of that--one could argue the larger half of that--rests on _your_ reputation.”

What good was that reputation now? The news of his cheating scandal and the fallout had rippled through every manner of media: professional news outlets and social media. It had spread all the way to Broadchurch and back. He had become a mediocre punchline. It was frankly amazing that they had managed to secure so many clients in the aftermath. “Much like your return to the clinic was not a matter of discussion, I’m afraid I have to insist that my choice is not debatable. If you disagree with one of the choices, we can discuss an alternative but we will need to find, hire and train three new members of staff.”

“If you didn’t want me back…”

The hell of it was that Bill was still figuring out if he did. He was still caught in a limbo between the woman that he’d clung to with such feverish desperation all these years and the hope that he could be _truly_ fearless. He had been putting off working out if he was avoiding Virginia because it _hurt_ to see her and the death of all the things that he had hoped for or if he had been hiding from the intensity of shame that made his gut roll and boil every time he started _really_ thinking of what he’d done.

Maybe he’d never really know. 

“The clinic needs you,” Bill said, “of course I was pleased that you wanted to come back.”

What he did know was he couldn’t be happy here. He couldn’t be happy with her. And he so very, _desperately_ wanted to be happy.

Virginia sighed, “alright. Alright, Bill. I’ll look at the resumes and I’ll send you my thoughts. Of course, I expect that you’ll draft some sort of plan for your transition away from an active partner to a managing member of the clinic. I’ll start an outline for the training program for the new members.”

“Thank you,” he said. (And maybe, when he was brave enough, _I’m sorry_.)

\--

_ **Good luck with Tess** _

** _Which is hopefully your ex-wife’s name_ **

** _Let me know how it goes. A call or a text_ **

How it had _gone_?

Tess hadn’t even sat still long enough to _listen_. She had recoiled like a wet cat as soon as he had opened his mouth to say Sandbrook. She couldn’t possibly have taken a half-breath to think through the facts as they were presented. That there was still a child killer out there. That Miller had looked at the facts and she had found things that made _no sense_. They could get _somewhere_ if they had enough resources to start sorting through the case again.

But no.

No.

She hadn’t even brought herself to look at him with anything but revulsion. As if she had any right to look at _him_ with disgust. As if she had read the official reports one too many times. As if it had been him in a hotel room getting dicked by a coworker. 

“Why do I get the feeling that I’m missing something important,” Miller asked when the hotel room door was closed and they had the illusion of privacy. “What exactly happened between you and your wife?”

“_Ex_,” Hardy snapped at her. He didn’t have enough energy to throw temper tantrums but he didn’t have enough peace left in his body to keep himself from picking up the paper coffee cups from the morning and throw them across the room. Light as they were, and empty as they were, it was more frustrating than satisfying when they hit the ground. 

Miller looked at him the way she looked at her son when he was laying on the ground screaming. But she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her keys and held them out to him.

“Don’t patronize me, Miller!” he shouted. 

But she kept her hand out with the keys shaking at the end of her fingers and he took them because the sound of the whole ring of them striking the wall across the room felt like _something._ It felt enough like something that he could collapse back into the chair. 

“Would you like to go again?” Miller asked.

Hardy laughed because he couldn’t scream and he very much did not want to cry. 

Miller sighed so long and deep that her body seemed to wilt back onto the edge of the bed. She sat there with her legs on either side of the corner and her hands resting against her thighs. Her face was full of the most awful sort of sympathy. “We’ve still got a plan. We’ve still got a good chance to solve this.”

“Is this your attempt to comfort me? To make me feel better that I was married to that woman? A woman who for--personal or political career reasons… Won’t reopen a case involving the murder of two girls? Is that supposed to make me feel better, Miller?”

“I don’t think anything can make you feel better,” that was real agony in those words. She would know as well as anyone. It was very gracious of her not to point that out.

He scratched his fingers through his hair and sat up properly in the chair. 

“Bit of a bitch though, your ex-wife. If you don’t mind me saying.” Miller was looking down at her hands and not quite at his face, except out of the corner of her eye. She was waiting to see if maybe she had overstepped but he snorted and she relaxed into a smile. “At least you have a type.”

“Come off it,” Hardy growled at her. 

“Are we still pretending that you are not carrying on a long distance relationship with a man that abandoned you on death’s door? Are we still pretending that with one another? Look at us,” she waved a hand around the little hotel room, “we’ve slept in the same bed. I think we’ve progressed to the point we can be honest. I also happen to think we’ve progressed to first names. Ellie? Alec?”

He rolled his eyes at the mention of his name. “For the last time, he did not abandon me. And--we are not here to talk about Bill.”

It might have been preferable if his phone had not chosen that precise moment to buzz loudly from his pocket. If it had only been the once, he could have pretended it was an irrelevant text but it buzzed again in the familiar cadence of a phone call and Miller’s whole face was so smugly amused at her victory that it was _intolerable_. 

“Should I leave?” Miller asked in a syrupy-sweet voice.

Hardy wiggled his phone out of his pocket to answer it before Bill hung up. It wouldn’t have been the worse outcome because they’d had the odd missed phone call, but they’d agreed to this call at this time. He held it up to his ear as Miller’s grin became unbearable to look at. 

“Hello,” Hardy said.

Bill’s answer was a beat of a silence followed by a greeting like a question. “Hello?” Like he didn’t understand what was being said to him. “Have I interrupted? I checked the time converter but if I got it wrong.”

“No, no you didn’t get it wrong,” Hardy assured him, “it just took a bit longer to get back than I expected.” He pushed himself out of the chair just as Miller’s eyebrows started inching up toward her hairline. Her cheeks were turning into a darkening shade of pink. 

“Oh well if it’s a bad time,” Bill said very, very softly. (And it wasn’t an ideal time.) 

“Give me a minute. Don’t hang up.” He dropped the phone away from his face to press it against his chest when he was halfway from the chair to the door. 

Miller had moved from the bed to the chair so she could watch him, “oh yes, you aren’t dating Bill at all are you. Did you want to take the keys? Sit in the car? Twirl your hair while you talk to him?”

“You’re insufferable,” Hardy hissed at her. But he did take the keys.


	11. Chapter 11

“Am I keeping you from something? You sound distracted.”

Fair was fair when Bill sounded like he hadn’t even managed to compel himself out of bed yet. There had been a disagreement that very nearly bridged into a proper argument (or might have been considered one if either of them had any idea what they were doing with each other) about how it wasn’t fair to expect Hardy to stay up until all hours of the night. Bill had _demanded_ in the end that they exchange the inconvenience of the time difference. It was four AM where Bill was, and he _sounded_ exactly like a man laying in the dark of his bedroom. 

“What?” Hardy snarled. The phone was resting on the bathroom sink as he pulled the failed knot of his tie loose for the _second_ time. “I’m trying to fix this blasted tie. I’ve only been doing this my entire adult life, you’d think I wouldn’t even have to _think_ about it.”

Bill chuckled into the phone. “You said you didn’t have to work today.”

“I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.”

“I didn’t know that.” Bill groaned as he dragged himself up to sitting (Hardy was guessing). His voice had the sound of a man wiping the sleep out of his eyes. He was more _awake_ and more _focused_ when he said, “cardiologist?”

“Of course it’s the bloody cardiologist.”

“I didn’t realize a doctor’s visit was such a formal affair. As often as you’ve seen him, I’d think you could get away with a shirt with a nice collar.” 

Hardy was breathing harder than a man having a fit over a lousy tie should have been. His fingers were still curled into the weathered fabric of the damn thing as he stared down at the blank face of the phone. Not for the first time, he _wished_ he could see Bill’s face. Tone of voice was well enough for guessing intent and emotion but there was something to be said for being able to see someone’s expression. “As often as I’ve gone to see him, I should be able to show up in my dressing gown.”

“Now there’s an idea. You know, when I was a practicing obstetrician, my patients would come in wearing all kinds of crazy things. Of course when you’re dealing with women in labor it’s more unusual to see them dressed up than showing up in their nightgowns.”

“It just feels like I should put effort in.” Hardy was staring at his own face in the mirror. He had made some attempt to tame his unruly hair and he’d trimmed his beard so it looked a good deal more _purposeful_ than it had only last night. Even these minor adjustments, even the tie left hanging loosely from his neck couldn’t distract from the cool color of his skin. It wasn’t going to change a damn thing. 

Men wore ties to meetings and weddings and work if they had to. They wore them to look presentable and accomplished. Maybe he was just trying to pretend that he was put together. Maybe he was trying to give the impression that he was doing well. 

“Is your doctor a man or a woman?”

“Why should that matter?”

Bill’s voice dragged a bit, caught on an edge of exasperation. “There’s a big difference between putting in effort for a meeting with a man and a woman.”

“Ha,” Hardy said as he pulled the tie off and threw it over the hand towel next to the sink. He picked up the phone and switched off the speakerphone. “I don’t think it’s all that different if you’re interested in both. Shouldn’t a sex doctor know that sort of thing?”

“My area of interest has always been more about the act of sex than the lead in.” Bill’s voice was always heavier when he was tired. It always sounded thicker, his accent got slightly deeper. They’d argued back and forth at the start of the calls which of them had the accent and which didn’t and never came to the obvious conclusion that they both did. “Although, yes I suppose that would be true. If you’re attracted to both sexes and you were attracted to a specific person it wouldn’t matter…”

“I’m not attracted to my doctor.”

“Of course,” was a breath of relief as sure as any Hardy had ever heard. “What time’s the appointment?”

“I’ll have to leave in about an hour,” or maybe an hour and a few minutes. He could push it back to the last minute if he needed to. “What were you saying yesterday? Something about hiring a lawyer?”

“Ghost-writer-slash-lawyer. To write out the plan for my transition away from an active member of the clinic. I’ve tried to write it but every time I sit down, I just end up staring at an empty document. I can write--I’m a published author--”

“Oh I’ve heard,” from Bill and everyone in Broadchurch with a sudden interest in the physiological aspects of sex strong enough to buy a book they weren’t going to read. 

“--Yes I know. I should start with finding out what contributions I _do_ want to make to the clinic and every time I start to think about it… I just…” Bill sighed. “I don’t know.”

Hardy had put too much effort into picking out a clean, unwrinkled shirt to justify flopping himself onto the couch. He barely had enough control over his own limbs to keep from slouching himself into the familiar hollow he always ended up laying in. The longer the call went on, the more certain it was he’d end up laying on the couch rolled half onto his side, facing the back of the couch. The world was littler there, it was only him and Bill’s voice and nothing to remind him that there was an ocean between them.

Between his nose and the back of the couch, he could close his eyes and think, if he really wanted to he could call a cab and find his way to Bill if he wanted to. 

“Seems like an important decision,” Hardy said, “what are your options?”

“Well that’s the problem. It can be whatever I want.” 

\--

Bill was sitting with his back against the low headboard (a real design flaw), listening to the sound of Alec sighing as he worked out what he wanted to say next. In the dark, that sigh sounded close enough it might as well come from an actual person sitting at his side. He was tossing words around in his head, picking out the right ones to back-track out of this conversation. 

Their flirtation--friendship? Relationship (whatever they were going to call it) had always teetered on the edge of things like this. For all that Betty liked to tease and for all the evidence that _something_ of substance was growing here, neither of them had ever spoken it outloud. He could be reading more into the quiet than existed. 

“I’m sure I’ll--” Bill started.

“No, Bill,” Alec said almost _impatiently_. “Tell me. What do you want?”

What he wanted most was not to be _here_. Not to have to figure out what he wanted. He wanted it to be tomorrow, or next week, or the week after when all the choices had been made and things had worked out precisely how they were meant to. He wanted to be free from choices and the consequences of them. 

It felt like the coward’s way out, the same he had done for most of his life. He’d put himself and everyone that had ever known him through hell in his single-minded quest to get exactly what he wanted. For what felt like all his life, he had _known_ precisely what he wanted. He had known _exactly_ what he had to do to get it. He had made every sacrifice and committed every atrocious act necessary to get there. 

And now, some days he couldn’t even figure out if he wanted to wear a fresh shirt or the one from the day before. It caught him in the chest, just behind his breastbone, where his heart was beating so fast he could hardly breath. It wasn’t a case of indecision but a full-body _fear_ that made his fingers and toes tingle with a sudden chill. 

“Bill,” Alec said again, but _softer_. “Tell me, it doesn’t have to be right or perfect or even good. It doesn’t even have to be possible. Just _start_.”

“I want to live in a house again,” Bill said. That wasn’t what they were talking about. It wasn’t even close to the problem that he was facing. It didn’t matter just then because it _wasn’t_ a deflection. It was just a place to start. “I never gave Libby enough credit for the home I had. I hate this apartment. It’s a box. A box stacked in with other boxes. I don’t have a backyard. I’ve got rooms without windows! My house had a window in every room. It even had windows in the garage. I remember I used to complain about it, about how stupid it was. I miss all those windows. I miss having something to look at--something _green_. That’s stupid isn’t it?”

“No. No, that’s not stupid at all.”

“This isn’t what I meant. You shouldn’t let me go on like this. You’re very kind and I appreciate it but…”

“Never mind about that,” Alec sounded like he was falling to the side. Bill had learned that sound in all this time. The way Alec’s voice changed when he stretched out on his couch, and how it changed again when he curled onto his side. They’d spent half a night laughing about it, guessing what the other one was doing. They’d been hiccuping like drunks at the end, smiling too hard to talk. “You don’t have to rush all the time. We’ve got time.”

Bill picked at the lint on the blanket over his legs. “I want to learn how to cook. I used to know how to cook for myself, I lived alone all through college, all the way until my residency. I actually used to make dinner for Libby and then we got married. I just… I just stopped.”

“A house and a cooking class. Those are things you can have. What would you do in your house?”

“Read. I’d read all the books that I kept saying I’d read. All the ones I never had time to finish because I was always working. I was _always_ working. I haven’t… I haven’t listened to a new album, read a new book, went to a movie, a museum? I have been _working_. I don’t want to work anymore. I don’t need to. The sort of money I’ve made? The sort of money I’ll keep making--between the book royalties and the clinic? Even with child support, even if Libby wants alimony? With the sort of investments I’ve made I never have to work again.”

“You told Virginia that you wanted to stay on as a managing partner.”

Yes he had. He had almost meant it when he said it. Because it was a nice halfway point between what he felt like he _owed_ her and what he _wanted_. Even now he was biting his lip and holding his tongue because there was _something_ he wasn’t quite ready to say. “Yes I did. I don’t want to be; I just thought I should. That she, that the clinic deserved more from me.”

“You felt like you had to,” Alec said. 

“Yes.”

And his sigh was patient, at least, “I’ve worked with a man or two that was only there because he had to be. Because he felt like he owed it to someone. Miserable people, all of them. I’m a miserable person and I’m only doing the job I’m doing because I have to do something.”

“You could move into my house, with me,” Bill said, “neither of us will have to work again if we don’t want to.”

\--

Hardy might have preferred to be _actually_ kicked in the chest. It might have been kinder. At least he would have been able to really get a good look at the assailant. At least he’d be able to feel the tread of the shoes, the strength of the leg, to properly and _truly_ feet the attack and not just be left with a sting in his chest. 

His lips were dry as a desert and his tongue felt like old sandpaper dragging across them. Everything he wanted to say got all jumbled together, so that even with his mouth forming around some kind of word he still didn’t know what it was going to be. In the end, it wasn’t anything but a sound.

A sort of choked and helpless noise. The utterance of a man who was admitting he didn’t know how to proceed. 

“You could have your own room, if you wanted,” Bill said.

“If I wanted?”

Bill must have been nodding because his voice was going up and down. “I wouldn’t want to presume that you would be comfortable--or that you would even be _interested_ in--at least the option would be there for you to choose. And I would be, I would be fine... With whatever...you wanted. Whatever you chose.”

Hardy pressed his hand over his face, dragged it down from his forehead to his mouth. He couldn’t remember the first moment things with his wife had gone from enjoying the moment to planning the future. He couldn’t recall if they’d ever sat down somewhere, if they’d been so nervous, if they’d been caught on the edge of terrible joy and joyous terror. Maybe they’d never had to bother being so outright about it. Things had always kind of flowed from one to the other with Tess. He’d been a cork in a stream, following where the water took him, from dating to marriage to fatherhood. He had _enjoyed_ life with her, when things were new and they were still travelling along together.

“So it’s my choice, is it?” Hardy said in the shallow space between his cupped palm and the phone receiver. “I thought this was about what you wanted.”

“I want to know if we want the same thing. As far as _we_ are concerned.”

“But you haven’t even said what you wanted.” Hardy didn’t know he was going to sit up until he was. He couldn’t have known he was going to stand until he was on his feet. What a fool he was, and how silly to be so _happy_ to be a fool. 

Just then, _anything_ was possible.

“I have so!”

“Have not.”

Bill huffed a sigh, like a spoiled child, “so I should just spell it out for you then? Is that what you need?”

“Yes.”

“_You_,” Bill gasped. “Alright? Damn it. Haven’t I made that obvious enough? All these messages and phone calls, and you’re the first person I want to talk to every day, the last person I talk to every night. We talk about everything! About breakfast, and snacks, and politics, and we had a two day argument about ferns, Alec. _Ferns_. 

“And I’m terrified, alright? I don’t have any idea what I’m doing? You’re a man! We’re not even on the same continent and all of your friends hate me.”

“They aren’t my friends,” Hardy snapped at him, “and I’m so popular with yours?”

“I think Betty is very fond of you, what she knows. She calls you my Scottish sweetheart. But don’t change the subject.”

Hardy wasn’t trying to change the subject. He wouldn’t dream of changing it now. He’d moved from right in front of the couch to the bookshelves with no clear idea what he planned to do once he got there. It just felt like he couldn’t stand _still_. Even his hand was moving restlessly from his chest to his side to push his hair out of his face and back again. 

“If I’m out of line…”

“Shut up, Bill.”

Bill’s answer was a noise so quiet it was almost a blip of silence through the phone. He was breathing and waiting and hopefully shifting on his feet like an idiot wherever he was. Maybe he was lying in his bed with his blankets pulled over his head like a child because Hardy was feeling a very strong impulse to do just that.

“I have a cardiologist appointment,” Hardy growled into the phone. He sat on the edge of the chair closest to the bookshelf and almost as soon as he touched the chair, he was overwhelmed with the need to stand up again.

“Oh well, don’t let me keep you from--”

“Oh shut up,” Hardy said again. He was standing _again_, “that’s not what I meant. I have to--I’ve got breathing exercises to help calm my heart. I’ve got pills, Bill. I’ve got packets and packets of pills. If I go in there right now, they’re going to rush me into surgery.”

“I’m very sorry,” said a man who didn’t sound like he was sorry about anything at all. If anything, he sounded _proud_ of himself, with a curl of a giggle at the end. “If you need a moment to collect yourself.”

“Don’t do that,” Hardy hissed at him. “I don’t need to collect myself. I knew before you did.”

And just then, even as half-assed as that admission was, all of the flurry of nerves went still. And Hardy collapsed back into the chair he’d only just abandoned. He slouched into the pillows, let his head fall back and his eyes fall closed. 

“I’m going to need it spelled out for me,” Bill said (oh-so-smugly). “I can be very dense.”

Hardy snorted at that. “I want a relationship with you as well. Is that clear enough with you?”

\--

Bill had gotten out of bed because some conversations were better had on your feet. Or maybe because Alec’s voice had taken on the quality of a man on the verge of flinging himself off a cliff. All that motion in his voice had made it impossible to simply sit still and listen. 

Now he was standing in his room, smiling at his rumpled bed, feeling _revitalized_ and _refreshed_. The very idea of getting back into the bed seemed as impossible to him as trying to remind himself that he was really too old to be grinning like a fool over something as simple as a boy liking him back. 

“Yes,” he said, “yes that is clear enough thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.”

Bill went out toward the kitchen, since it was closer to five than four. He might as well put on some coffee and find something to snack on. Maybe he’d actually sit at his tiny square dining room table. (If he could find room under the pile of unopened and ignored mail.) 

“But,” Alec said. “Perhaps we should leave this out of your work document?”

Truth was, Bill had forgotten where the conversation started. He set the pitcher he used to refill the coffee maker in the sink and turned the water on halfway to fill it. “Right,” he agreed, “it probably isn’t necessary to include my romantic aspirations. I do feel that I need to consult a lawyer about my options as far as retaining ownership without actually working and--but that’s another conversation. So,” he turned the water off, “how much longer?”

“No, no we’re not doing that.”

“What?”

“You know what. As soon as I give you an answer you’re going to try to prove that you knew sooner. We’re not wasting our time with it.”

Bill popped a fresh pod into the machine and set his cup in place. He leaned against the counter as the machine set to work making him coffee and tried to work out what he could say _next_. He’d no sooner licked his lips (and almost came up with something to say) when his almost words were interrupted by Alec.

“I wouldn’t move to America, though. I don’t mean to be _unreasonable_ but it seems like something we both should know before we go any farther.” There was a quality to Alec’s speech when he was opening a door with his words. It was a tremble that only existed when he was waiting for someone to leave. There it was now, hidden underneath that attempt at bravery.

“I’m sure they have houses in Broadchurch.”

“Don’t tease.”

But he _wasn’t_. Bill could could on a few fingers the number of things keeping him _here_ and he was enough of a bastard that his own children weren’t even on that list. He was tethered by obligations, not by relationships. Maybe he’d miss Betty most of everyone but she’d proven herself to be absolutely unshakeable. (And it was her fault to start with.) 

“I’m really not,” Bill said so softly he could barely hear himself. “Though, I don’t know if the people of Broadchurch would accept me back after my reprehensible behavior. I might have to look for something within commuting distance.”

“I’m not going to let the opinions of strangers make choices for me. Besides, it’s not the people of Broadchurch you need to be worrying about. It’s just a few of them. Mostly just the one. And she’ll never forgive you so there’s no making her happy.”

“Ellie, I presume?”

“Aye.”

Bill carried his coffee over to the table and used the mug to push the mail to the side far enough he had a space to set it down. “You’ll just have to fix that. I’m sure she’s a rational woman. You can just explain that despite the rumors in the town, we were _not_ a couple and therefore I was under no obligation to stay with you while you continued to show willful disregard for your own health.”

“Is that before or after I tell her that we are a couple _now_?”

“We’re a couple,” Bill repeated. He was smiling again, as stupid as he’d ever smiled. 

“Yeah,” Alec agreed.

“What time did you say your appointment was?” Bill was in no hurry to let the conversation end. Even filled with quiet pauses as it was, those pauses were shared spaces. They were comfortable enough to sink into without worry that they indicated annoyance or intolerance. 

“I should leave in a few minutes,” Alec said. He didn’t want to, the way Bill never wanted to hang up. 

It was a wonder they hadn’t fallen asleep on a phone call as reluctant as they’d become to hang up. Even now, Bill was frowning into the coffee, thinking how long it would be until he could squeeze in another call. And how there were things he meant to say that he hadn’t even had the time to get in yet. (And so many he’d said that he hadn’t intended.) “You can call me after though.”

“Won’t you be at your office?” 

“I’ll work from home,” Bill said, “I don’t have any patients.”

Alec’s voice was smiling again when he cleared his throat to say, “I’ll call you after then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to say that I always read every comment and each of them warms my heart. You are incredible bright spots in my day. I always want to reply but also I am catastrophically bad at interacting with other humans. 
> 
> Thank you for the time you take to leave comments. I genuinely love them.


	12. Chapter 12

Alec Hardy was not, despite all the current evidence to the contrary, a fourteen year old boy struggling with his first childhood attraction. He hadn’t even been this embarrassing at fourteen, standing dead center in a struck-silent room, trying to play back the last two minutes to find out if he had _actually_ said words out loud.

Miller had been by the wall she’d commandeered last Saturday after she’d had a bit of a fit about how she couldn’t think because she didn’t have enough _space_ to look at the details. He hadn’t been a fan of walking past the spread out timeline of a crime that had soaked through his skin and settled into his heart. There had been a bit of an argument, some unpleasant words were shouted and Miller got her way.

Hardy had _intended_ to explain the situation about Bill (and perhaps also the fact that a date had been set for his surgery) but she had been so overbearing and smug about bullying him into doing things her way that he hadn’t.

No.

He had just waited until this very moment, when she was standing by the wall, mumbling the same thing about a double order of wood flooring, to simply blurt out: “I’ve decided to start dating Bill.”

Even before Miller finished turning away from the wall. Even before her face registered the shock and her slack mouth tightened into a grimace. Even before she cycled through the information that was presented to her and found the first of (what was doubtlessly several) objections she wanted to voice, Hardy knew he had fucked up. If he had retained any semblance of control over his own mouth, he would have explained it how he had intended. He would have offered her a cup of tea and a comfortable seat and explained how there had been a misconception, and while Bill had some negative points, he was also someone that Hardy _enjoyed_ spending time with.

“For fucks sake, Alec,” Miller said. It wasn’t the shout he was expecting, but a sigh of exasperation so bone deep it seemed to rattle through her whole body. That was the sound of a woman who had _known_ this was inevitable and still couldn’t quite have made herself believe it would happen. Her hand dropped from tapping the pen tip on the wall to slap against her thigh. She was shaking her head in the very next moment, with both eyes closed and her mouth twisting around the word, “_why_?”

Hardy was obviously not meant to answer the question because he was not given time to do anything but pull his glasses off his face and gather a breath big enough to say anything. (And he had a whole speech he’d worked out in the shower.)

“That man left _you_. You were on death’s doorstep and he left you! He left you and went back and he had sex with his ex-wife and he’s an American and he watches people have sex and writes books about and look at you! For Christ’s sake, you can’t even look a pretty woman in the eye without fainting. That’s to say nothing of the men. I didn’t even know that you were interested in men and who could blame me for not knowing? You haven’t shown one ounce of interest in anyone at all, male or female, the whole time I’ve known you. And now you’re going to stand there and tell me that out of all the people that you could have chosen, out of all the options available on the planet, you’ve chosen _Bill_?”

“He didn’t leave me.”

“He didn’t stay.”

“We weren’t together!”

Miller scoffed at that. Her whole body seemed to sneeze with indignation, making her twitch from her toes to her wrinkled nose. “If you weren’t together why did you let everyone go on thinking you were?”

“Why did you tell everyone we were?” Hardy demanded. “Damn it Miller. You were wrong then and you are wrong _now_. Bill’s not a great man and neither am I, and if you expect that I should just keep waiting until I find someone that meets your approval oh well, I have the feeling that I’d be waiting a long time for that. I’m not a people person,” and no words had ever been more true about him.

“You’re really not,” Miller agreed.

“And I don’t get along with anyone.”

“Awkward. Gangly. Sort of,” she motioned at her face pulled into a mask of an ugly scowl.

“Yes, thank you, Miller. Yes. I am awkward. That is what I am. I always have been and it’s kept people away from me that I don’t have the time to deal with. Why does everyone think that you have to make people like you to be happy? What use is it? You can have every person in the whole world like you and it means nothing, it’s all an act. It’s _exhausting_.”

Miller looked, at least for the moment, almost apologetic. Her sigh wasn’t defeated because Miller was simply not a woman that could be defeated by anything, much less by someone like him. Her tongue slid across her pressed-flat lips before she said, “Bill is not exhausting?”

“No.”

“Does he know that you’ve decided to date him?” Her eyebrows quirked up at the words, with a faint twitch of amusement pulling at her lips. “Or will this be a surprise for him?”

“Of course he knows.”

Miller nodded, slow and steady and understanding, and then she turned back to the wall like the whole conversation hadn’t even happened. “But _why_ did he make the same purchase twice?”

\--

Bill was not, by any standard, an impulsive person. Every single one of his less-than-admirable choices had been made after extensive deliberation on the matter. He had thoroughly and _exhaustively_ thought through each action and it’s most likely consequences before deciding to proceed. On the few occasions he had behaved without forethought he almost always ended up making a goddamn fool of himself but he had finally come to a time in his life that being considered a fool was more palatable than being considered-- (Well, really any number of synonyms for the word ‘terrible’.)

That did not mean, however, that he _enjoyed_ the slow-growing sensation of foolishness that was spreading across his skin like a fresh pink sunburn. He didn’t like feeling out of place in everyday locations. He didn’t want to be stared at or whispered about or even acknowledged in any way. 

Bill Masters was just a man, like anyone else, in a pharmacy, between two rows of gift cards, absolutely drowning in an unimaginable selection of pastel colored offerings. 

“Keep breathing,” Alec said. This whole thing was not his fault, but when Bill mentioned the idea of getting Betty and Helen a card (not even five minutes ago) Alec had not laughed it off as something silly and overly sentimental. No, he had said that it seemed like an appropriate thing to do. He said that they would think it was nice. 

Now here they were. Bill standing halfway between the baby cards and the generic congratulations cards. “I am breathing.”

“They’ve got a card for everything nowadays. Just find a card.”

Just find a card, said the man who hadn’t gone to work today. The one that was probably shuffling from his kitchen to his couch and counting that as _exercise_ for the day. Just find a card as if Alec Hardy could have done any such thing without developing palpitations at the very thought of having to express his (kind) emotions in a way other people could interpret them. There were no rolling Scottish growls to be found on congratulations cards. Not even so much as a single och on any of them. 

“I thought you were good with women,” Alec said when the silence went on a beat too long.

“What prompted you to come to this erroneous conclusion?” Bill hissed at him. It wasn’t that Bill didn’t want to get a card. Betty would appreciate the effort, even if it were terrible, just knowing that he had stood here fretting over the different fonts would make her smile. 

“You’ve had a wife and a mistress?”

“Both of which did this sort of thing for me.” Bill crouched low enough to pull a promising looking green-tinted card out of it’s slot while Alec made the very sort of growling-groan purely Scottish sound that conveyed how disgusted and disappointed he was to hear those words. “I’m making an effort now,” Bill said softly.

“You are. Although not sure what sort of help I’m going to be about it. I haven’t bought more than a birthday card in years.” Alec was relaxing back into wherever he was sitting, “and I haven’t met Betty or her wife.”

“It can’t matter much. They aren’t going to remember the card. I can’t think of a single card that I’ve ever received that I remember.” That wasn’t completely true but it was true enough that it should count. Although Alec’s hum of noise seemed to indicate that they shouldn’t be using themselves as examples in this scenario. Bill sighed, “I’ve got a green one and a blue one and a white one that says congratulations on the front.”

“Simple.”

“Elegant.”

“Bland.”

“_Alec_,” Bill said. 

“_Bill_,” was a mockery of Bill’s frustration. It was a gentle reproach for how desperately he wanted to not be standing in this aisle. 

It would have been easier to forego the whole thing and just _tell_ them that Helen’s treatment was a success and she was pregnant. He didn’t _need_ to do this. (But he wanted to, because he had been terrible to Betty and she had been as instrumental to his success as Virginia. Because she was his _friend_, maybe his oldest and maybe his dearest friend.) 

“What would Betty want?” Alec asked, because that was all that mattered.

Bill’s embarrassment and Bill’s indecision. How silly and out of place he felt in this aisle, how long he’d stood there desperately overwhelmed by a wealth of offerings. How his first instinct was to grab a card at random--any card at all--and run as fast as he could out of the building. None of that mattered at all.

Betty would want to know that he tried. That he really, actually, tried. 

“She likes bright colors,” Bill said. “Simple patterns?” 

By the time he got to the register, he was already running twenty minutes late. It was another ten to get to his building and five to get from the parking structure to his office. He arrived two minutes after the appointment was set to start, feeling as if his heart was going to burst straight out of his chest, covered in a sweat from jogging across the parking garage and down a flight of stairs to the lobby. 

Betty was wide-eyed with alarm or surprise as he came through the door of his own office as the last man to arrive for the appointment. “Everything all right there, boss?”

Bill only fussed with his jacket to buy himself time. It afforded him a few precious seconds to catch his breath and reorder his disorganized thoughts. Buying the card had felt like walking barefoot across boiling glass, as if it were the very worst aspect of the whole process, until he had been sitting in his car outside the pharmacy trying to figure out what he was meant to write inside.

“Everything’s fine, thank you,” he said when he turned back to face them.

Helen was _beaming_. She was practically outshining the sun itself. While he looked like a disaster of a man, she had arrived perfectly composed from her pulled back hair to her fresh nail polish. Even as she waited for him to take a seat, she was leaning into the narrow space between her and Betty. “We were worried,” she said.

“No need to worry,” Bill said, “just some--traffic--well, I guess you’ll want to get right to it. No reason to make you wait any longer than you’ve already waited. So I…” Just had no idea how to say anything, every sentence that formed in his mind seemed like the wrong one until all he could think of was the wrong thing to say. The wrong words in the wrong order in the wrong tone. 

Betty was looking at him with such hopefulness, caught between waiting to hear the words to confirm she would _finally_ get what she’d been hoping for all these years and the fear that he would do what he had always done.

That he’d take a moment like this, to be remembered with joy and love and turn it into something ugly. 

“Here,” he said, because he’d _found_ the right words when he was alone in his car. He just couldn’t remember them now. He held the bright yellow envelope out between them.

Helen was smiling when she took it, but Betty was almost frowning. “I hope it’s good news,” Helen said with a shiver in her voice. He hadn’t bothered to seal the envelope (since it barely had time to let the ink fully dry) so she was able to slip the card out immediately.

Neither of them even had a chance to open it. The front said _congratulations_ and all that energy that had been caught in the frantic grip of their hands between them exploded into a gasp of noise that couldn’t be called a scream or a cry or a shout but some mixture of the three. Helen was crying before the card was even fully removed from the envelope and Betty wrapped both her arms around her wife to pull her close.

Bill was extraneous to the moment, just an awkward bit of furniture off to the side. “I’ll give you a moment. If you have any questions I’ll be in the conference room.”

And it seemed like they hadn’t even heard him.

\--

Hardy said, not for the first time, not even for the second time: “this really could have waited until you finished your shopping.”

And Bill answered, the same this time as the time before, “if you do not want to talk to me, you can hang up.”

This left them at an impasse. Hardy was of the opinion that as they were two adult men of a certain age they certainly didn’t _need_ to talk to one another with such pressing urgency that they needed to carry on like a couple of teenagers. He’d developed enough patience in his life to be able to hang up the phone and simply wait the half hour or hour or so it took Bill to finish collecting his groceries and get home again. That would allow them to talk freely, without restriction or worry about who might overhear. That would allow them to not be that obnoxious person in the store that pushed their cart idly down an aisle talking into their phone, acting as if buying groceries were a leisure trip.

Bill was obviously of the opinion that Hardy would not hang up and was therefore unbothered enough to continue on with the conversation without interruption. “Today he was wearing a green shirt. A _lime_ green shirt. I just don’t know how we’re supposed to be expected to take him seriously with the way he dresses. I don’t recall reading anything about his tendency toward such informality in his resume even the cover letter seemed very well put together but I guess anyone can find a template off the internet these days--”

Hardy was sitting outside on his front steps or he might have just collapsed back into his couch with a huff. He was _irritated_ and he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what was so irritating about this call. (Well he could put at least one finger on it.) “What color was his tie?”

“No tie.”

Oh well. If the man wasn’t wearing a tie could he even be trusted to see patients? 

“What does Virginia think?” Sitting out here was supposed to soothe him. Miller had kept going on about how water was soothing and how he should sit outside more. Wear a sweater and sit outside, she kept telling him. Let the breeze and the sound of the waves just wash over him. And it did, it brought the smell of the water and all the things that lived in it right to his face. It drove a chill through his clothes and deep into his flesh. 

Bill’s drag of quiet was the same as a guilty child’s. “I haven’t asked,” wasn’t precisely defensive but it was right on the edge of it. “I know it barely matters anymore. Young professionals don’t adhere to the same guidelines. It doesn’t impact his effectiveness but I just…” Bill sighed, “I don’t like it.”

“If you don’t like it, tell the man to wear a different shirt.” This conversation had lasted over the course of days, across text and phone calls, with Bill’s growing exasperation at this new employee’s fashion choices getting a little less tolerant each day. “Rewrite the dress code.”

“Alec,” Bill said.

“I really don’t like that name,” Hardy said with more force than had intended. “I never have.”

Here he was, still waiting for the water and the wind to do something about the electric current pulsing through his nerves. Here he was, still hoping that there was something that was going to make this moment _easier_. Still waiting to know why he’d been putting it off so long and why it _mattered_ so much to start with. 

No soul that knew him would say Alec Hardy was the sort of man to put too much worry into events. He wasn’t the sort of man to make a fuss over special days. He’d been on the verge of dying so long that even that had begun to feel like it didn’t matter at all.

But here he was, rubbing his squeezed shut eyes with his fingers, trying to force himself to apologize for the roughness. 

The silence had gone on too long to be comfortable and when Bill finally made a sound, it was a quiet gust of breath followed by the sound of him clearing his throat. “Be that as it may, it is _your_ name. You’ve never had a problem with me using it before. If you do not want to talk to me while I’m shopping we can hang up.” Another quiet pause, and Bill’s voice hesitant and quiet all but whispering, “I didn’t realize you were really upset about it.”

Because he _wasn’t_. At least not enough that it would have mattered if it were an occasional occurrence. Sometimes they were _embarrassing_ and that was just a part of falling in love. Maybe it surprised him that it was as embarrassing and all-consuming _now_ as it had been when he was a young man but it was hardly a reason to be angry. 

Hardy managed a scoff, and only that because he pushed himself off the stairs with enough force the sound was knocked out of his chest. And since he’d gotten _started_, he added, “it’s not that.”

“But it _is_ something.” Bill’s quiet was almost a hum. “Not something for a grocery store?”

“Best not,” Hardy agreed.

“I’ll call you back after I check out.” That meant that Bill was giving up his shopping trip in the middle. That _wasn’t_ what Hardy wanted and he would have said so but Bill had already gotten out, “give me ten minutes.”

Ten minutes was as good as an eternity in the present circumstances. Ten minutes was enough time for him to get from his front steps to his couch and off that again. He was pacing the whole of his house from the tiny kitchen to the little bedroom, again and again, holding the phone in his hand as he worked out exactly what he was going to say.

A date had been set for his surgery.

He was going to have the surgery.

He was going to have a pacemaker.

He wasn’t as healthy as the doctors would like for the procedure but he was _healthier_ than he was the last time they’d broached the subject. He was, as the doctor put it, as stable as they could hope for him to be. 

He’d known for weeks. He’d known since the day of the Conversation. All the times he’d talked to Bill. All the Saturdays he’d spent with Miller. All those chances to _say_ something and he hadn’t. He’d convinced himself he wasn’t ready, he just needed a few more days. He didn’t want to bother anyone with it. He didn’t see the point of getting into an uproar about it. 

His doctors assured him it was a perfectly routine surgery.

And _still_, Hardy wasn’t ready for his phone to ring. He wasn’t ready to answer it. But he swiped his thumb across the screen and held it up to his ear. “Hello,” he said. He’d ended up in his bedroom so he sat on the end of the bed, on the roll of blankets at the foot.

“I am in my car. I am not driving.”

Hardy couldn’t stop himself from smiling and it did nothing at all to make him feel any better. “I’ve got a date for the surgery.”

“Good,” was such a knee-jerk response that Bill had to repeat it a few times before he even seemed to register he was saying words out loud. “Good. Good. They’ve decided to proceed with the pacemaker?”

“Yes.”

“Outpatient?”

“They said it would be an overnight stay.”

Bill hadn’t run out of questions (as it took quite a bit longer to reach the end of Bill’s questions) but he’d stopped asking them. It was so quiet through the phone that there was simply no guessing what the man was doing in his car. The only thing that could be determined was that Bill was breathing. Neither of them were rushing to be the first person to talk next, Hardy because he wasn’t sure _what_ Bill was thinking and--

“But this is good news,” Bill said _at last_, “this is an improvement. They wouldn’t schedule the surgery if you weren’t well enough to have it. I was a surgeon and we do not operate on patients that are not likely to survive the procedure. I mean, on the occasion there was an emergency c-section that had to be performed with the knowledge that one or the other of the patients was not likely to survive, but for a routine surgery like this--”

“It’s set for the eighteenth of April.”

“That’s so soon. That’s--That’s barely two months. I’ve got so much left to do.”

“You don’t have to rush--” 

The sound Bill made was both a cough and a laugh. He was _offended_ in the very next breath, spitting out a string of words: “I don’t have to rush? To _rush_? What exactly do you imagine I would rather be doing, Alec? I don’t have to _rush_. I’ll just take my time. I mean, after all, imagine all the important things that are keeping me here! I just bought a couch, and I couldn’t possibly be asked to leave the couch without seeing that it’s properly cared for. And heaven knows I don’t have the resources to expedite the process of planning a trip. Certainly, I should just _take my time_. I’ll just come when I’m ready, I mean it’s only a minor surgery. It’s _routine_. Why would I want to be there to support my boyfriend? I’m sure you’ve already told several other people that you’ve got this surgery planned. I’m sure you’ve got it all planned out. I should count myself lucky that I’m finding out _before_ it's done.”

With all the anger growling into Bill’s voice he shouldn’t have been smiling, but every single word was overfilled with exasperation and annoyance and every word soaked through Hardy’s skin and filled him with warmth. He was resting his chin in his hand, leaning his elbows onto his thighs at the foot of the bed, smiling at his phone while he was being bitched at. When there was a break in the rant, he said, “I only meant I would understand if you needed more time.”

“I know what you meant,” Bill said. “And I _meant_ what I said. I want to be there.”

“I want you here,” Hardy said half into the phone and half into his fingers. And before they get too deep into conversations best not had in grocery parking lots, “are you going to be able to drive?”

“When I’m finished being angry.” But at least that was said with some humor. “I’ve got cold things.”

\--

_**Vertical. Purple. Stripes**_**.**

Not even the excessive use of punctuation properly conveyed his feelings about the atrocity that was walking around his office. It had been hardly tolerable when he caught a glimpse of it outside his open door way and it had become even _less_ bearable during a meeting that seemed to last _forever_. Bill hadn’t even heard half of what Virginia had been explaining (and so he’d missed every one of his cues to contribute) because _Brent_ had a habit of fidgeting.

A man couldn’t overlook a travesty of men’s wear when the person wearing it couldn’t even have the decency to be still. 

Even as he sent the text he couldn’t be sure the color of the stripes could be qualified as purple. It was an approximate guess, but there was a wide range of acceptable purples (although a much less acceptable range of vertical stripes). This was an offensively bright and busy sort of purple that seemed to bleed over the edges of the stripes. It was like neon lights in the dark.

Virginia was leading their trainees away before Bill realized the meeting was over. He hadn’t taken a single note; he hadn’t made a single observation. He’d done nothing at all of use to the business (but he had composed several lengthy texts to Alec in his head about how atrocious the shirt was). 

Betty leaned forward from where she’d been sitting at his side, and slapped her notepad on the table as she cleared her throat so she could really _enunciate_ every word, “so I see that same sex attraction is finally hitting you, huh?” She was so amused by herself that her smile was pointed at the edges, “I understand, I _do_. The same thing happened to me in junior year. Everywhere I went? Beautiful women. I couldn’t get through a single day without having to sneak out for a cigarette. I didn’t do anything about my _frustrations_ but it helps blow off steam, you know?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

“Sure, right. Of _course_. All I’m saying is maybe you should lay off staring at the new guy or someone’s going to notice and I got to tell ya, it doesn’t look good.” She stood up (still so amused at herself) with a condescending pat on his back as she went behind his chair toward the door.

He spun around to watch her go, “Betty, I am not _attracted_ to that man.”

“No, of course you aren’t.”

“Betty,” he said again. He followed after her with more hurry than was technically necessary. She paused just outside the door, just far enough away from the cluster of their new employees that they might get away with whispering about them. “If you must know, I just think his clothes are ugly.”

Betty’s smile had never been more violently pleased in all the time he’d known her. 

“He dresses like a child,” Bill said. “An ugly child.”

“Fine, fine,” she said without a single hint of agreement, “I promise I won’t tell your Scottish Sweetie that you’ve been grinding your teeth over the new guy. Might what to up your recreational meetings with your,” and she curled her fingers inward as her hand jacked up and down, “you know?”

They had been too caught in the conversation to pay much attention to what was happening farther away than each other’s faces. Bill certainly hadn’t noticed any noise coming from just behind his left shoulder and Betty hadn’t seen when Virginia left the milling group to head back into the conference room. Neither of them were worried about being overheard because just then, in that little bubble, neither of them had any idea they _could_ be overheard.

Bill would have recognized Virginia’s half-hidden laugh anywhere. He’d heard it often enough, always to the side, at conferences and meetings and in private settings. He knew it so well, he knew, even without turning around, exactly how her face would look. 

How her mouth was pulled into a flat line because she was trying not to smile, how calm her eyes looked, how cool her face went when she was pretending she hadn’t done anything at all. Even her hands were pressed against her own waist, holding the papers she’d come to retrieve between her palms and body. 

“Oh,” Betty hummed, and then just as quickly, “I’ll just send them to lunch. It’s early but after a meeting like that? Yeah, lunch is good.” And she was gone before Bill even had a chance to decide what he intended to do.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Virginia said with the authority of a woman who was definitely lying. “At least, nothing that you’d rather I didn’t hear.”

Bill had rather she not heard any of it. Sooner or later he would have to tell her something. Sooner, as it turned out, he needed to give her a good reason why he was walking away. He had been telling himself that he just wanted to be sure. That he wanted to wait until he was very, very sure. Every step he took to get closer to Alec (and he had taken several already) was another confirmation that he was more sure about the decision to leave than he had ever been about anything. 

Every day he thought, maybe he’d just wait another day. He didn’t have a good way to tell her yet. He didn’t know how to start. He didn’t know how she’d take it. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings (or he wanted to spare his own). Every day he thought he’d be braver tomorrow.

This was not how he wanted to find out any of it.

“No,” Bill said and stopped. He shuffled back into the conference room so he could close the door behind him. He was standing around the corner of the table and she was at the end just watching him how she always had. 

Virginia knew him better than any person on the planet. She had seen him stripped down to the skin. She’d seen him at the height of his arrogance and the lowest depths of deplorable behavior. She’d endured him at his worst, and she’d never shied away from any of it. Even now, when she looked at him, she saw him completely and it was almost _unbearable_. “You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said softly.

No, of course he didn’t. (And he did not know how to start. It was paralyzing, finding those first words. But he’d managed it for Alec, and he could manage it now.) 

“I didn’t know how to.”

“So,” Virginia set the papers back on the table but she didn’t relax into the shared space. “A Scottish sweetie?” She was making it easy for him, the way she always had. 

Bill nodded, “his name is Alec. I met him when I went to Broadchurch last year after--well, after everything.”

There were too many emotions caught in the uncertain slant of Virginia’s eyebrows to be able to guess which she was feeling the most. Her smile didn’t falter, but it did go softer at the edges. She shrugged like she couldn’t contain it, and she said, “and you’re happy?”

“Yes.” 

There again, like a pinch, a half-realized thing, her face changed and went back again to the same smile. She picked the papers up again with a nod, “I’m happy for you then.” She offered him one more smile before she went back around the table to the far door she’d entered through. 

Bill let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and sank back into the chair just behind his legs. There was a buzz of something just underneath his skin, a great swarm of nervous energy and no idea how he felt about it. But the thing that felt _first_ was a terrifying sensation of separation. 

As if all this time, and all the quiet, he had been hiding from the idea that Virginia was no longer his. That he was no longer hers. They were separate now, co-existing in an office space, with nothing but a job to tie them together. He had well and truly lost her through abuse and negligence and he _knew_ it. 

Oh he _knew_ that.

It was terrifying to feel it; to watch her leave because she owed him nothing but the common courtesy of a colleague. That she wasn’t obligated to show her emotions to him. The whole of their interaction had been so brief he could hardly sort out how he felt about it; he certainly didn’t know how she felt. If she was hurt or confused or genuinely happy for him. 

It wasn’t his to know anymore.

But even the desperate beat of his heart was not out of fear of what he had lost; no, it was the settled sensation of an old pain and the realization that just then, his first instinct was not even to follow her. It was to catch his breath.

To be here, by himself, to put himself back together.

Bill couldn’t do anything about how Virginia felt about things anymore. Decisions had been made and plans were being formed and he was _leaving_. The only thing he could hope to do was to make amends for the things he had already done and hope that there could be a chance of forgiveness in the future.

That was a terrible lonely feeling, coming to terms with your failures, but he could bear it.


	13. Chapter 13

Hardy had made the (obviously) erroneous assumption that Miller’s invitation to her (unlived in Broadchurch) house would require him to offer some manner of comfort or support. He hadn’t properly thought it through or he wouldn’t have been as surprised as he was to let himself in (after a scream of ‘door’s opened’ echoed loudly enough that even neighbors two doors down were likely to have heard it) and very nearly find himself the victim of a large duffle of clothes being unceremoniously thrown down the stairs. 

He hadn’t brought anything at all but himself and his phone because the last time he’d shown up with _too_ many gifts and with an ambiguous invitation like this one he wasn’t even sure what else he might bring. 

Fred was standing in the doorway of the room with the TV, sucking his thumb with his fingers curled into his T-shirt and his eyes as wide as perfect circles. He released his grip on his own shirt to point upward, toward the sound of distant thumping, and the aggravated grunt of effort that directly preceded a box sledding down the stairs, knocking into the wall at the bottom and pitching wildly sideways. It spilled out a collection of odds and ends, anything from CDs to knickknacks to balled up socks. 

Hardy didn’t flinch because he was in any danger. (Although if this degree of careless violence continued on uninterrupted he might be.) No, he flinched because it was a loud noise and a reckless tumble of things and because his nerves were as tired as his body. He looked down at Fred who had swapped one thumb for the other so he could reach his hand up so he could wrap his slippery saliva-covered fingers around Hardy’s last two fingers. 

“Perhaps we should just wait in the room,” he said to the boy. 

Fred pulled him back to the comfort of a dusty couch and a proper TV, playing what passed for children’s TV these days. Hardy sat on one corner of the couch with the expectation that Fred would sit on the other, but the boy climbed right into his lap all knees and elbows, and situated himself where he could slouch into Hardy’s body and still see the TV.

They completed one very confusing, but nevertheless brightly colored, episode before the wild tossing of things gave way to the equally thunderous sound of Miller jogging down the stairs. She knocked into the doorjamb with such speed it left both her and the wall shuddering. She was dressed so casually (just a tank top and a pair of sweats) that he almost didn’t recognize her. 

“How long have you been here for?” she asked.

“I knocked.”

“You knocked?”

“You said come in.”

“You could have come up?”

If given an infinite number of years, Hardy still would not have been able to piece together the words to tell her that though he had grown fond of her, and he understood it was polite to announce one’s presence, there was no way that he was going to attempt to climb the stairs in the midst of what was obvious a much-needed bout of psychotic house-cleaning. Instead he just waved at the boy in his lap, “Fred knew.”

Miller’s hands were on her hips, her eyebrows were pulled down to severe angles. She was pink from exertion and slightly coated with sweat, but she rolled her eyes rather than starting in on bitching at him. “Give me a bit longer, I’ve got to carry this out.”

“I’ll help.”

“You’ll sit,” Miller snapped back at him. “You’ll help? You’ll help what? You’ll help me spend the rest of the day at the hospital, that’s what you’ll do. I’ve made it this far, I imagine I can make it the rest of the way. No you’re doing the best good that you can do right there, keeping Fred entertained.”

Hardy might have put up a fight. He might have pointed out that moderate level of light exercise was good for him. He might have said anything if only she’d stayed long enough to hear it. But rather than linger, she immediately set about gathering up the things she’d thrown down the stairs. He watched her carrying the piles down the hall, listened for the back door slapping shut after every trip. 

He eased Fred off his lap and back onto the couch and the boy made an objecting noise but didn’t try to make him stay. Hardy couldn’t get past the doorway because Miller was dragging a box overladen with the sorts of things that you acquired in a lifetime. There were clothes, and books, ribbons and trophies and a few picture frames with jagged bits of broken glass still clinging to the edges. 

There was only a backpack and a half-filled suitcase left at the bottom of the stairs, so he picked them up and followed Miller outside. He’d expected to find an overwhelmed trash bin but he found an overfilled fire pit instead. There were even a few patio chairs set back from the mammoth pile of clothes and other hopefully flammable objects. Miller was emptying the last of the box to the side, but she saw him as she was wiping the sweat off her forehead.

“What in the hell do you think you are doing? Put that down.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” he snapped back.

Miller pulled the bag out of his hand and frowned at him with nearly twice as much disapproval. “I don’t need to be telling you that none of this is strictly legal, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not have to list you as an accomplice.”

“You invited me over.” And maybe more important, “and I don’t know what all this is. I couldn’t say in a courtroom what happened here even if I was asked.”

She snorted as the last few sweatshirts and balled up under clothes were thrown on the pile. Once she was satisfied, she stood there with her hands on her hips just looking at it. “It’s not too early to light it, is it? People usually do this sort of thing at night, but it’s a bit chilly out. A fire might be nice.”

Hardy nodded, because there was nothing else to say.

Miller didn’t need his approval or his support, but all the same he went back inside to retrieve one of the bottles of wine he remembered seeing on her counter. He didn’t bother with glasses because it didn’t seem like they would need any of them. He locked the front door and checked on Fred before going back out. 

The fire was already eating its way up the pyramid of things by the time he got back outside. Miller was standing, not sitting, staring at the flames as they inched along the seams of pants and curled the edges of old books. They licked along the outline of CD cases, and hugged the curves of odd bits and bobs. 

Hardy pulled the paper wrapper around the top of the wine bottle. “I didn’t know you were planning on moving back.”

There were tears in Miller’s eyes, a miserable redness to her face as she grimaced a smile that didn’t want to break into real tears. “I’m not letting him take anything else from me, I think. _I_ didn’t do this. _I_ didn’t do anything. Why should I have to run away? Why should I have to hide? I loved Danny just like I loved my own sons.” Every word was harder and harder to say, until she was pushing her fingers into her eyes like she could stop the tears if she tried hard enough. “I’m a mess,” she said with a gasp.

He held out the wine bottle for her, tried his best to smile for her. “You’ll figure it out.”

“Do I look like I need a drink?” she demanded, but she took the bottle and held it up against her chest. The question hung between them, just like the awful redness around her eyes. 

Hardy was no good at these sorts of things. He never knew what the right thing to say was, and in all his trying to figure it out, he ended up saying all the wrong things. He had been miserable. He had been heartbroken. He had been devastated, if not precisely how she was, then in a way that felt as impossible to survive as this must have felt like to her. All he’d wanted, in those long days after he’d left his wife and child, was to know that someone _cared_.

Maybe it was a terrible idea, but he shifted a step closer and lifted his arms slow enough she could get away if she wanted. But Ellie didn’t move, she stood there as the tears welled over her lashes and she let him hug her. She pressed her forehead against his shoulder as her body shuddered.

\--

Bill was not working. 

To be honest, (and he was trying to be lately), he couldn’t even pretend that he’d put in the proper amount of effort to convince anyone that he even intended to work. He’d arrived at work late (and why not, when he wasn’t scheduled to do anything at all), and he hadn’t bothered with a tie or a suit jacket. Even his shirt, and unbuttoned collar, could hardly be described as worthy of being seen in an office setting. Certainly, it was too shabby to be worn anywhere he expected to be addressed as ‘doctor’. More like, it was the kind of thing he’d wear to some unfortunate family obligation that Libby bullied him into attending.

It was most certainly a shirt for a neighbor’s mediocre barbecue when you wanted to stand by yourself with a lukewarm beer and daydream about how you’d much rather be doing just about anything in the world. 

Still, it was comfortable, and it wasn’t stained and Bill had discovered that if he was doing nothing at all anyway, nobody really cared what he looked like. Even if they had cared, he barely left his office now that the new hires had progressed out of the endless days of training meetings. He was safely tucked away behind his desk, scrolling lazily through real estate listings in Broadchurch.

He felt a bit silly, not about looking at the houses (because research was one of his greatest passions) but at how much easier it was to do when he knew Alec wouldn’t call or text him. His boyfriend (another thing that made him feel a bit silly to say) was off with Ellie either helping her cope with some upsetting event or cleaning her house or possibly just meeting up about Sandbrook in a new place. (Neither one of them could figure out a probable contender among the options.) Bill wasn’t going to buy a house without standing in it; he wouldn’t even rent one, but all the same he’d like to know the general style and price and commodities of homes in Broadchurch.

The bit about how he wasn’t ready to answer (Alec’s) questions about why he was looking at houses confused him. He’d already announced his intention to move there; it wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that moving required having a place to move _to_, but all the same the where _to_ was a conversation they hadn’t really gotten to yet.

“That’s nice,” Betty said.

Bill hadn’t seen her come through the door, or around the desk, or to come to a standstill behind his left shoulder. She was holding an armful of files, squinting at the screen (but she didn’t need glasses, she swore). “Betty!”

“Oh really? It only took you forever to notice,” she said as she invited herself to lean closer to the screen. In fact, she seemed to think that his shock meant she should go ahead and drag one of the chairs around to his side of the desk. “Well come on,” she said once she was sitting, “you’ve got my attention.”

“I--”

“Are looking at properties in Broadchurch because you’re going to move there to be close to your Scottish sweetheart? Yeah, boss. I figured that out. I’m a quick one.” She motioned at the screen.

Bill’s hand was hovering over the mouse, caught between doing what he was told and figuring out if he’d wandered into some kind of trap. Betty didn’t _look_ angry, not even the sort of angry she sometimes looked when she was trying so hard not to look angry. No, she was relaxed in her seat, watching him look at her without any sign of distress. 

“Betty,” he said, almost like an apology, “I was going to tell you first.”

“Before Alec? I never figured you for much of a romantic, but showing up unannounced from another continent, that’s pretty damn romantic.”

“No,” Bill said, “of course he knows. Why wouldn’t he know! I wouldn’t just go there with the presumption that I’m wanted.”

“You’re dating. Of course he wants you.”

Bill scoffed at that. 

Betty rolled her eyes, “I’m happy for you. Hell, I’m fucking thrilled for you. All these years? All these things we’ve been through, all these things we’ve seen you know what I’ve never seen? What I didn’t even think I’d ever see?” There apparently weren’t words for what she meant, just a circle her finger drew around his body. A softness to her smile looking at him that he couldn’t swear he’d ever seen from her either. 

He nodded.

“You should probably tell your wife next.”

“I’m writing her a letter,” Bill said. “And before you tell me that I should tell her in person, I am _aware_ but I need to organize my thoughts and Libby and I have always had a bit of--a communication issue. I want to be clear and concise and I can’t ever seem to be either when I try _talking_.”

“Virginia?”

Bill couldn’t _imagine_ telling Virginia. He’d been entertaining the idea of having his lawyers tell her after he’d already gotten on the plane. It was the coward’s way out and he knew it. If he ran away from this, and the unresolved things that were wrapped up around Virginia, he would never be able to be at _peace_. Getting to Alec was important, but doing it the right way was _more_ important. Still, he grimaced as he said, “I’m working on that.”

“Good,” Betty cleared her throat as she pointed at the computer again, “well? This is the only fun part about buying a house.”

\--

Hardy had kept an eye (as Miller put it) on the fire while Miller facilitated the transfer of Fred from sitting unattended in the room with the TV to her sister. She hadn’t seemed very happy about having her sister look after Fred, but she also didn’t seem happy about much of anything. 

When she came back, she had another bottle of wine with her. They were sitting in the chairs, no more than a few feet apart, with a water hose between them and both of their phones in grabbing distance in case the fire got out of control. It had shown no signs of being anything more than your average sort of fire but things like that were unpredictable. (Especially when he didn’t know what exactly she had thrown into the pile.) 

Her voice was wine-damp and quiet, an undertone to the gnawing sound of the fire: “they set the date for the trial. I’m sure you know.”

He did.

“I just want it to be over. I want not to ever think about him again. I don’t even want to hear his name. I don’t want to see his face. Not in pictures, not in videos, not in person, not in the papers, not in my sons’ faces. But, there’s no escaping it, is there? I can’t pretend he never happened. Even after the trial, even after he’s gone and he’s not coming back--he’ll always be here.” She took another drink. She growled a groan of noise as she swallowed, “that’s foul.”

Wine wasn’t generally meant to be drunk warm, straight out of the bottle, after an unknown period of time of having been left sitting unopened on the kitchen counter. Still the taste of it didn’t seem to be enough to dissuade her from taking another drink.

“It starts to feel like it’ll never end,” he said. He’d heard it said (and never understood it exactly) that misery loves company. He didn’t know if Miller’s misery was the sort that wanted to invite over guests, but he was here. “But the staring gets less and less, and you start to think that you’ve turned a corner. You haven’t changed, what happened hasn’t changed, but people move on around you. It becomes bearable and you can _almost_ forget and it starts all over again. One person looks at you a little too long, another stares outright. Someone catches you on the street to tell you what they think.”

Miller’s laugh was so bitter it almost sounded like crying. Her face was pink enough it was hard to tell if it was from the heat or the wine or the laugh. “You’re garbage at this.”

Hardy shrugged.

“Well, what about when we solve Sandbrook? Wouldn’t that help?” She wasn’t asking because she believed it. She was asking because there was the edge of something desperate in her voice, something she’d been fighting off all this time. That realization that nothing could ever go back to how it had been. Even after the trial, even after the sentencing, even after everything was settled and done with, things would never be what they were. Her (ex)-husband had altered her life forever.

“Aye,” he said, “maybe a little. Maybe it’ll help to know that it’s finished. I’ll be able to let go of it a little bit. Those families will have answers at last, but it won’t change what’s been said. It won’t change what’s happened. It won’t give me back the years with my daughter. It won’t give me back my health. Those things? I can only fix those by going forward.”

“Shut up. If you don’t have anything _good_ to say then just stop talking. _Christ_. You’re--” Her hand waved wildly in his direction. “You’re no help! I’ve got kids. I’ve got a job. I’ve got-- I’ve got responsibilities.”

“You’ve got a friend,” he said quietly.

“I said shut up.”

Hardy did what he was told.

Miller collected herself in the quiet, sipping at the awful wine that made her scowl with every fresh sip. And when she thought she could speak again, she looked over at him. “We’re going to solve Sandbrook. It’s right there. I can feel it. I _know_ it.”

He could feel it too, the shape of the answer being carved out of the missing bits. Miller’s sense of organization had driven him crazy but he could see how she’d dug into the missing bits, all those hollow and unfilled spaces where the answers were. 

“Ugh,” she said in the very next breath, “talk about something else. Talk about something good. Talk about-- About-- For fuck’s sake, talk about Bill. That always puts a smile on your face. Enough of this, I came here to clear out the house because I’ve had enough of hiding myself away. I _refuse_ to be blamed and punished for what that bastard did. I _refuse_.”

Hardy wasn’t sure if he was meant to talk or meant to be quiet, so he waited it out while Miller took another drink and grumbled to herself. She rearranged how she was sitting so she was facing more toward him with a sort of listening slant to her body. And once she was set, she just _stared_ at him with a level of expectation that did nothing at all to indicate what it was she was _expecting_ from him.

“What?” he asked when the stare became unbearable.

“I said talk. You and Bill must have done something embarrassing lately. Come on, then. Cheer me up.”

\--

Bill was not wearing a tie but that does not mean he hadn’t thought about it at great length. In fact, even as he finished checking and _double_ checking that he really had chosen the best placement for the laptop and the optimum angle to tilt the screen, he was _still_ thinking that he might look a little shabby. He might look a little unimpressive.

The thought was as ridiculous as how thoroughly he’d scrubbed his kitchen clean because you could just see it in the background of the video. He’d swept and he’d vacuumed and he’d bought a new pillow for his couch to add a touch of personality. Libby had always said a couch was made better by a nice throw pillow. She had a collection that they rotated through based on season and holiday and he’d never really understood why they needed a pillow with a polar bear wearing a scarf until this moment.

Not that his throw pillow had a polar bear on it.

No, it was more of a geometric design.

The point was, that Bill was checking the screen _again_ and finding only his own face looking back at him, feeling distinctly underwhelming to look at. He’d worn a nice shirt because he would have done the same if he were going on a date and this felt very much like--

That was definitely to say that it most certainly could be counted as--

A date.

Oh hell, he hadn’t been on a date since he’d asked Libby out ages ago. He hadn’t even dated Virginia, just cycled through illicit meet-ups and work dinners and sex for research purposes. (Not that either of them had really cared about the pretense farther than it allowed them a flimsy excuse.) 

Except the longer he sat and waited for Alec to call, the more and more sure he really should have put on a sweater or something like it. He wasn’t cold, but a nice sweater was always a good thing to have, and he had a few of them in his closet that would have made a good impression.

Not that he needed to. They had met one another when neither of them were at their best, and removed from romantic aspirations, they had already seen one another in less than favorable conditions.

Still, it felt important that he put forth the effort. Perhaps more important than it was for Alec to be prompt in calling. It was early for him but not very early that made it afternoon for Alec and there was really no excuse to be late for a video call that was your idea to start with. 

The ringing startled him so much he dropped his phone just as he had picked it up to check and see if maybe he’d missed a message changing the time. The rush of his heartbeat made it hard for him to take in the whole of the screen. There were a lot of colors and sounds and just for a second, none of it made sense. His nerves were electric, on high alert, just before he found the green accept call button on the screen and the awful ringing ended. 

A picture blossomed, fuzzy and out of focus at first: fat blocks of color that went smaller and smaller until he could make out the shape of Alec’s face very close to the screen. He was scowling with his mouth and his eyebrows, peering down through his glasses at the computer in front of him. The sharper the picture got, the more pronounced the annoyance on his face. He was muttering, or else his mouth was moving, but no sound was coming through the screen.

Bill didn’t speak and he couldn’t say why.

Alec clicked the mousepad and the blanket of nothing gave way to a static-filled burst of sound. His voice followed along, moving with the shape of his mouth, “it really shouldn’t be so complicated. It’s very highly recommended, that’s what Daisy told me. Practically idiot proof, she said. Idiot proof? Seems like it would have just started with the microphone on if you ask me.” 

Of course he would have sounded exactly how he did on the phone. Of course his voice wouldn’t have changed. And yet, hearing it in time with the sight of him was something _entirely_ different than all the hours they’d spent on the phone up to this moment. Alec leaned back far enough the room around him came into better focus. While Bill had scoured his kitchen for fear a stray spec might have been seen, Alec’s old couch did nothing to cover the chaos of the desk behind him or the dusty half-open curtains over it. 

(And it didn’t matter at all. Alec could have been sitting in a garbage dump and it wouldn’t have mattered.)

“Can you hear me?” Alec asked.

Bill nodded.

Alec’s smile was was exactly as stupid as the one stretched across Bill’s face. The flush spreading along his cheeks was the very same silly blush spreading on Bill’s. They might as well have been two schoolgirls watching a cute boy take his shirt off.

Alec pulled his glasses off (and what a shame) and set them off to the side (where there was a table, presumably). His smile went a bit softer, like his oversized sweater hanging off his shoulders looked, and he said, “you can talk, Bill.”

“I know,” he said but his voice caught and sounded strangled and high. He cleared his throat while Alec just _grinned_ at him. When he tried again, his voice sounded much more reliable. “I just, I just can’t think of anything I want to say, yet.”

“Oh, yeah? I can’t swear I’ve ever had that effect on someone before, usually they see me and they can’t shut up. But, I like this. Take your time.” 

Every word oozed a sort of playful arrogance that Bill had only ever _heard_ before. It was different to see how Alec’s body moved while he talked. How his eyes twinkled with humor, how his lips went a little pointed at the edges. He was positively _glowing_ with pride over his ability to poke fun. 

(Only, and he wasn’t going to dwell on it because there were so many better things to see, even that glow couldn’t quite bring a full depth of color to his face. And even that sweater, as big as it was, couldn’t fully hide how sharp Alec’s bones were beneath it.) 

“That’s very gracious of you, Detective Inspector. I am a master of observation, you could say I’ve made a career out of it.”

Alec snorted, “I don’t think it’ll be that sort of observation. At least,” he said as his hand slid up his leg and he shifted how he was sitting, “not this time.”

“As a general rule, that manner of observation isn’t as arousing as most people like to believe. I’ve mastered the act of detaching myself from that part of myself, it’s common among the medical community.” He knew, at the very start of the sentence, that he really shouldn’t have kept talking but sometimes he just couldn’t stop himself.

Alec wasn’t offended (of course he wasn’t), but he shifted so he was leaning back into his couch. It was the sort that you sank into. His hips were lower than his knees, and Bill could see the whole length of his thighs at the bottom of the screen. “Is that so?” Alec asked as his fingers slid to the inside of his leg, as the tips pressed into the inside of his knee, and slid back toward his hip. “Total detachment, _doc-tor_ Masters?”

“In a professional setting,” he said (quickly), “not that it would be professional between--now _Alec_, you know what I was intending to say.”

“Just because I can’t, doesn’t mean you can’t.” But the slow crawl of his fingers stopped halfway up his thigh. He relented with just a slight huff of disappointment. “It’s up to you to decide the conversation, I believe.”

“You always say that.”

“Just reminding you of your responsibilities.”

Bill leaned back into the couch (he had convinced himself he wouldn’t because it showed his round belly in a far too realistic way). He pressed his lips together and Alec did the same thing on his side of the screen. They were both making stupid faces at one another, not saying a word. From duck lips to sticking their tongues out, they ran through a whole series of childish looks before Alec laughed.

“Alright,” Bill said, “alright--well, since you brought it up, before we move into the _observational_ phase of the research, we ask our patients to fill out a comprehensive survey that allows us insight into the sexual history and habits.”

“I’d wager that’s a bit more invasive than you’d ask your average partner, but if it’s the _proper_ procedure…”

“I didn’t mean…”

If they’d been on the phone, Alec would have had to have made a noise, or said a word, or sighed into the phone to convey what was being silently conveyed by his blunt stare through the screen. He crossed his arms over his chest, as his head tipped ever so slightly to the side, like he was going to have to squint at this thing happening in front of him for a good long while before it necessarily made sense.

“It wouldn’t be a _bad_ idea to have some idea of each other’s experience…”

“Of course,” Alec agreed.

Bill had never been very good at the interview portion. As detached as he was (and that hadn’t been a lie) he couldn’t always find the right words to relate to people. He struggled with the correct tone, because people did get so emotional about sex. They reacted in ways that he didn’t anticipate and couldn’t respond to. Virginia was better at the human aspect of the job. Not to say he wanted her here.

He didn’t want her anywhere near Alec. For now. At least.

Alec was still just watching him, arms crossed over his chest, patiently waiting for a question to be asked. The bastard knew what Bill was going to say, he was probably rehearsing answers in his head while he waited. 

“Have you had sex with a man?”

“Define sex,” Alec said because he was a _shit_ and for no other possible reason.

“Kissing, manual stimulation--”

“Yes.”

“--Frottage, mutual masturbation--”

“Yes.”

“Oral sex--”

“Yes.”

“What?” Bill said. (To be honest, between Alec and himself, they had been expecting some sort of exclamation of surprise a few yes’s ago.) “Given or received?”

“_Everyone_’s gotten a blowjob, Bill.” Alec didn’t have to say it like it was some definite fact of the universe. As if men and women everywhere were simply throwing themselves at the chance of performing oral sex. (Or maybe they were in Alec’s experience. Which would require a whole secondary line of questioning.) 

Bill had leaned forward at some point, so he found himself leaning back into the couch with one of his hands absently touching his face. He could hear Alec chuckling but he wasn’t _looking_ at him so he didn’t see it. 

“You never said what _Brent_ was wearing yesterday.”

“I didn’t?”

Alec leaned forward to grab his phone and took his time about scrolling through their messages under the pretense of looking for it. That might have been more convincing if he were really looking at the screen instead of mildly glancing downward as his thumb did the scrolling. “No, no mention. It’s a highlight of my day, hearing what _Brent_’s wearing.”

“Oh,” Bill couldn’t remember, and the harder he tried to think about it, the less the idea of it would come into focus. “I don’t think I saw him yesterday.”

“Weren’t you at work?”

“Well yes,” but that only meant he was physically present somewhere in the building. Sooner or later that was just going to mean he briefly sat in the parking structure before leaving. “I was in my office the whole day.” 

And now he had proof about the sort of stupid smiles Alec did, so there would be no more arguing about their existence. Bill had _known_ they existed in the quiet space, he’d heard them forming in the quiet, but now he could _see_ them happening. 

“Not a word from you. I am working, it just takes time.”

Alec just nodded with great exaggeration. They were just quiet a beat, and then Alec said, “I like your face.” 

As stupid as that sounded, Bill _understood_ it exactly how it was meant. “I like yours too. Right, right, conversation. Betty said that she knows someone that would be interested in buying the couch.”

“Good.”

It was easy to fall into a conversation, easy to trace ideas of the things they were going to do. How Bill’s furniture would be sold off and his bags packed. It was easy to talk about how Broadchurch would react to the sight of him, and whether or not Ellie would strangle him as soon as she saw him. They talked about Betty and Helen, and plane trips and nothing, and meandered along an argument about sausages that neither of them could remember starting. 

They could have talked about nothing at all, and Bill would have been just as happy. 


	14. Chapter 14

It wasn’t that Bill had never been told he was wrong about something. Hell, it was very far away from the fact that Bill had never been told he was wrong. Libby had complained and compromised over his shortcomings. She’d nudged and suggested that he could do better, that he _should_ do better until she must have finally accepted that no matter how sweetly she asked or how sternly she suggested, he was simply not interested in enough to listen. So when it mattered to her, or when he’d been at his worst, she developed a certain voice and a certain lean to her body that indicated that if he wanted the charade of their marriage to continue he _had_ to do as she said.

And Virginia? Well Virginia was a class A con-artist. She hardly had to do a damn thing to modify his behavior outright because she had insinuated herself so close to him that more often than not, he found himself doing whatever it is she might have wanted before she even had to ask. He’d been in love with her, so blindly and stupidly in love with her that he might have burnt down the whole fucking house if she asked.

She hadn’t.

She rarely asked for anything, and he rarely gave it.

He’d considered it harmonious when it benefited him; but hindsight provided a sobering understanding that his lack of compromise and her manipulation of the situation had been masquerading as something it most definitely was not. They had needed one another, to get something that made a miserable time in their lives better. He had wanted love, and sex, and freedom and she had wanted a career and security and respect. 

But neither of his lovers had _ever_ been so outright in their condemnation of him as the blisteringly pissed Scotsman growling into the phone with such venom that it left a damp hot spot against Bill’s ear.

“A _letter_,” Alec said again, not for the second or third time, but _again_ in the way that suggested it had been repeated innumerably. “Well that’s just _grand_ isn’t it? How thoughtful of you. How kind of you. You’re sparing her the indignity of having to watch you not give a single shit about her to her face. I can’t imagine how grateful she’d be to _receive a letter_ that lets her know how little she matters. A _letter!_ And what do the children get I wonder? A text?”

There hadn’t been a pause in the rant that was long enough to allow Bill to cut in and defend himself. (Not that there was much to defend.) There wasn’t much of a pause now, but Bill still interrupted to say, “you’re taking things out of context. A letter allows me to organize my thoughts--it allows me to be clear about my intentions and my reasons so that I can communicate clearly--”

“Oh fuck off,” Alec growled again. “It’s a coward’s way out. You’ve written it down and you’ve organized your thoughts but you don’t want to hear what she’s got to say. I imagine you’ll be mailing the letter from the airport?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Fair? You’re not a _child_, Bill. There is no _fair_. You’ve got the chance to be _decent_ to a woman I’d wager hasn’t seen a good deal of decency from you in a very long time. To do the _right_ thing by your children. If you need a pocketful of notecards and a rehearsed speech to manage it, then _fine_, write all the letters you need.” He seemed to have reached a point of exhaustion, because he just meandered to a stop.

They sat in the overheated silence until it turned prickly and tense. Until the feeling of shame had soaked so thoroughly into his skin that it felt like he’d never fully squeeze it out again. It was a horrible feeling: a tightening knot in his gut that made him feel unwelcome in a space that he had considered safe. 

He’d never been so thoroughly scolded, not even by Betty who had been the only friend he’d ever had to scold him at all. The situation felt _hopeless_. 

“I didn’t anticipate you having such a strong opinion,” Bill said softly. Or at least, he hadn’t anticipated that strong opinion to be so _opposed_ to his proposed plan of action. He hadn’t anticipated _disappointing_ Alec so completely. “Perhaps we should say good-bye for now…”

“Oh don’t pout,” Alec cut in. “You’ve only got the one chance to do this right, Bill. Once you walk away, whatever you’re leaving behind is how they’re going to remember you. If you don’t find a way to leave it properly, it follows you. It follows them.”

The shame, as ugly and unwanted as it was, settled fully into place. He was looking at his own lap, trying to find some defense and failing because Alec had only put a furious voice to things that Bill hadn’t wanted to think himself. And it hurt, but not because it was untrue, because it was _right_. He was _terrified_ of what Libby would say to him. Of what his children would say to him, or not say to him. 

He was afraid that he really was a man who could walk away from every reminder of the life he’d had and never think of them again. (That he had become, after all, exactly the man his father was.) 

“I know,” Bill said, “I know.”

\--

Hardy was not dressed properly to answer the door to his ex-wife. He had barely managed to be dressed properly to open the door at all. In fact, his only real motivation for bothering to put on proper clothes at all (instead of the same pair of lounge pants he’d been wearing for three days) was the realization that it wasn’t very far off at all until the surgery. That by itself was not a motivator to bother with pants that had buttons _and_ zippers, but with the surgery came Bill. Hardy wasn’t planning on putting in a colossal effort at looking presentable (because why start now) but he could manage putting on a sweater and a pair of fresh pants.

However, between the comfortable and not very presentable sweater he’d chosen and the fact that these pants had not been as clean as he might have liked when he put them on this morning he felt a great and insistent urge to swing the door shut into Tess’s face rather than allow her wandering eyes to continue to drift amusedly over his body. She’d started somewhere around his collarbone and dropped down to look at his house slippers. 

Which meant he only had a few moments before she swept her gaze back up to his unkempt beard and his slightly too long hair.

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” Tess asked with the pretense, if not the full measure, of politeness.

“Of course not.” He stepped forward, not back, out onto the narrow space left free on the porch. He was still pulling the door closed behind him when she cleared her throat like he was a child.

“Wouldn’t you rather talk in the house?”

“No, this is fine.”

That wasn’t the answer that Tess wanted or expected. She was standing on his porch with her arms crossed across her chest, squinting at him as a cold breeze blew across the water and across her face. Her expression was coming to a slow boil of the sort of anger that had always ended with raised voices and accusations. That sort of anger was the worst of her, as far as he was concerned.

Part of him, a rather large and impatient part of him, wanted to tell her that he wasn’t interested in whatever had brought her to his door (for the first time since he’d moved to Broadchurch). The only reason he restrained the urge was because there was the slightest possibility that her presence had to do with their child. 

“Alec,” was not sympathetic or even concerned. It condescended from a great height with the intent of telling him what he’d done wrong. “You’re just going to get cold and you get cranky when you get cold. Let’s just go inside for a minute.”

“I’m not going to get cold.”

“Ha!”

This was the sort of thing that could go in circles until you were dizzy from it. He’d gotten caught up in just the same as her in the past. That urge to to be heard and to be proven right so strong and so bright that it almost drowned out all rational thought. But this time, the only thing he could feel was the decidedly petty urge to be back inside his house and the calm and certain understanding that she was not welcome inside. “Whatever you’ve come to say, you can say it out here or you can go.”

Tess just _stared_ at him.

“I’ve got an appointment in an hour that I need to prepare for.” (Which was only true if one considered the plan to meet Bill on video chat to be an appointment and one considered a vague and undetermined time to be about an hour.) 

“I’ve got a call from Ricky Gillespie.”

Hardy scoffed at the words and the way she said them and the look on her face like she had a _point_ she was making.

“Don’t make that sound at me, Alec. I told you that we weren’t going to reopen the case! I told you to leave it alone. You don’t even have jurisdiction, you don’t have any business going around and talking to Ricky or--”

“Two girls _died_,” Hardy cut in, because it was the only point that mattered. “_Two_.”

“And that’s tragic--”

“_Tragic_,” came out like a cough wrapped up in a laugh. 

Maybe it was different for her because Tess hadn’t been the one to find the girl at the weedy side of the stream. Maybe it was because they were built differently and for all her lectures and all her sighs and all her talk of _emotional needs_, Tess could _choose_ when and what she wanted to feel. Oh she was a beast in a fight, telling him how he hadn’t ever fulfilled her needs. Telling him that she’d gone looking for affection (and she meant sex) from other sources because he hadn’t given it to her how she needed. But she’d stood in his office with a vague tint of pink shame and a bright white defiance, daring him to say any string of words to condemn her for fucking another man _and_ losing the best chance they had at solving this case.

Maybe he had it wrong. Maybe her defiance _was_ guilt. Maybe it was the ugliest kind of guilt, something so large and so shameful that you couldn’t turn your face to it. Maybe it ate at her under her skin and she couldn’t stand it so she simply never thought about it.

It didn’t matter to him _why_ because their only relationship to one another was the child they shared.

“Yes, _tragic_,” Tess snapped at him. “But at some point, it has to be enough. We did everything we could to solve that case and nothing _good_ is going to come out of you refusing to let it go.”

“We did everything?” After watching Miller work at it, as relentless and tenacious as a dog with a bone, it felt like they hadn’t done _shit_. They’d had a theory they thought they could prove and they’d simply _given up_ when it fell apart. They’d had every clue _then_ that Miller and he had _now_ and they hadn’t found their way through the fog nearly as far. They hadn’t started to wonder if maybe Claire wasn’t as innocent and charming as they’d assumed. That maybe Mr. Gillespie with his unnecessary phone calls had more to hide about than will to solve the murder of his own goddamn daughter. 

They had done the best that they knew they needed to do _then_ but that was before Sandbrook ruined his marriage, and his health, and half his life. Miller was teetering on the edge of that moment when everything came together and _made sense_ and Hardy was hardly doing more than supporting her through it but they were just now, _finally_ coming up on the notion of doing _everything_ they could.

“Maybe you think so,” Hardy said, “but I am going to solve this case.” He didn’t growl the words. He didn’t snarl. He didn’t hiss. He said them calmly and _slowly_ and in the precisely opposite way he’d yelled at Bill just a few days back. He managed it not because he wasn’t _infuriated_ but because he’d let her go. He had well and truly moved on. “_You_ are not going to prevent me again.”

She settled back on her heels like all the air had been knocked out of her. “So you’re going to do whatever you want, no matter what I have to say about it?”

Hardy found himself nodding, and it felt light and good. “Yes, I’d say that sums it up.” Since there was nothing else to say at all, he turned the knob he hadn’t quite taken his hand off and shifted back toward the door. “Have a safe trip home,” he said. 

\--

Bill should have called first. If only he’d been able to realize his mistake before the door opened; if only he’d been able to think about anything other than the swelling discomfort growing steadily outward from the center of his chest. 

No, all his time had been taken up with sweaty, unfortunate nervousness. He’d been so completely consumed with the double edged fear of fucking this up and disappointing everyone that he hadn’t even had space left in his brain to worry over things like basic manners. That was what had brought him here, like a stranger selling vacuums, to his former front door, standing across a threshold he’d crossed so many times he couldn’t begin to guess a number, looking at his oldest son on the other side.

His oldest son who hadn’t been smiling when the door was open, but whose face was still perfectly pulled downward like an old dog settling by a fire. The twitch of his lips turned downward as his eyes drooped and his shoulders tensed and lowered. His fingers coiled tighter around the knob as he stared. And the longer they stood in silence, the more pinched his expression became, like a festering odor had started creeping up his nose. 

“What are you doing here?” Johnny asked.

“I came to speak to your mother,” he said (just like a travelling salesman), “I’m sorry, I thought you’d be at school.”

“It’s Saturday.”

Bill looked at his watch that did not now, nor had it ever, told him what day it was. When he looked up again, Johnny was still standing there, still grimacing at the sight of him. “So it is. Can I come in? Is your mother home?”

“You can wait here,” his son said, “I’ll see if she can come to the door.” He didn’t wait for any sort of acknowledgement, but swung the door shut with far more violence than was necessary. There was only a second to see anything at all, but it looked like there were boxes stacked up in the entryway behind him. 

Bill was an idiot, patting at his pockets, wishing he had gone ahead and used notecards how he’d intended to do. The letter he’d written had so perfectly and concisely conveyed the things that he wanted to say to Libby. It had been _easier_, with that air of separation between her and himself. He had known, writing it, that he wouldn’t have to see her face when he read it. He wouldn’t have to see her disappointment and disgust with him. Whatever her response, sympathetic or scathing, it would also be removed.

They would be safe from one another.

The door pulled open again and Libby stepped out onto the porch dressed so differently than anything he’d ever seen her wear that he almost wasn’t sure who she was. Her face was radiantly beautiful, covered in sweat and not make up, with her hair pulled haphazardly back from her face with a pink cat-eared headband (that must have been Jenny’s). 

“You can’t simply show up whenever you want, Bill,” she snapped at him, “and before you say anything--and I am sure you have plenty to say--I’d like to know how you found out. Who told you, because I haven’t been talking to any of the people that might have had a good reason to tell you.”

“Tell me?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know,” Libby said, “why else would you show up _today_?”

“Libby,” before she could really start in on telling him off, “I don’t know what you think I know. Nobody’s told me anything.”

The sum of their marriage could be divined from the bitterly skeptical stare Libby gave him. From how cooly she stepped to the side to regard him there. “Then why are you here?”

“I,” (wish I’d brought along notecards), “came to tell you that I’m moving. I’m moving away. Out of the country.”

“You?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m moving to Broadchurch. I’ve met someone and I’m moving there to be closer to them and I thought I should tell you before I left, and see if I--if you thought, if I should talk to the kids before I go.”

Libby was a woman with a thousand smiles and no two of them meant the same thing. The smile that crossed her face now was one he might never have seen before, a little mean-spirited and a little amused and most importantly, a little surprised. Her voice broke in a laugh that rang through her voice as she said, “well you have impeccable timing as always Bill. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Leaving for where?” he asked, and: “You were just going to leave and not tell me?”

“I didn’t think you’d care to know. The last time we talked--which was months ago, Bill--we agreed that you’d call when you’d gotten your life back together.” She wasn’t angry. She just cleared her throat, “what would you say to the kids?”

“Oh, uh-- I thought I’d tell them that I’m moving away and that I’d-- That I’d like to call them.” (That had not been part of the letter when he’d written it.) “I’d like to talk to them once in a while, maybe once a week and see how they’re doing and what they’re doing.”

“And are you going to call them?” Libby asked, “are you going to see how they’re doing?”

There was nothing about the idea of it that seemed _easy_. There was nothing about interacting with his children that had ever felt _natural_. He hadn’t wanted them (and he’d been sure to make sure everyone knew it) but he could see _now_ how he’d been so afraid of what he’d do to them that he had become the very monster he wanted to save them from. 

Bill was finding out he was capable of things he couldn’t have imagined a year ago. Standing there, with his heart pounding out of his chest and a woman that had less reason to believe in him than anyone, he found himself nodding. He found his voice full of confidence, saying, “yes. Yes, I am going to call them.”

“This must be some woman you’ve met,” Libby said.

“It’s a man, actually.”

Libby did laugh then, full of shock and outrage. Her whole face went pink with it. “Of course it is,” like it made perfect sense, “come on. They heard Johnny telling me you were here, I’m sure they’re listening at the door.”

\--

The numbers at the bottom of the screen kept ticking off seconds that became minutes. The longer they sat, each of them on their own couches, separated by an inconceivable distance made up by land and water, the less it seemed like they would manage a proper conversation. The quiet wasn’t abrasive; it wasn’t uncomfortable. 

They were sitting like old men, at the end of a long week, sipping their preferred drinks and finding exactly the right amount of comfort in sharing the space. (Even if this space was created by a computer screen.) Bill’s hair was a disaster of waves with the coiled ends of curls breaking out at the edges. He was slouching low on the couch, with his knees lost beneath the vision of the camera. There was a book resting off to the side, split open and left face-down on the couch cushion. He had a bottle of wine snuggled up to his left side and a coffee mug that he kept resting on the flattest part of his belly.

Hardy was already dressed for bed. He might have enjoyed a glass of wine, but he made do with a calming cup of tea. There was no book on his couch, but the scratchy sound of music playing too low to be properly heard. (Really, he should have turned it off rather than down.) 

He was thinking, if they were only going to sit here and drink and be quiet, he could probably slip sideways on the couch and take a nap. (As late as it was, it wouldn’t be called a nap.)

“It went better than I thought it would,” Bill said. He was almost smiling, and he deserved to be. Any man who faced up to his failures and fears and lived to tell about it should be able to smile again. “Howie asked if he could move with me.”

“Howie is the little one?”

“He’ll be six soon.” There was that almost-smile again. “I had to tell him that I don’t even know where I’ll be staying. I’ve looked at some of the real estate in the area but I wouldn’t feel comfortable making any kind of offers until I’ve seen the place and-- Well, I mean obviously you and I would have to have a conversation about whether or not the kids could visit. And even that’s assuming we plan on living together. I wouldn’t just _assume_ that we would live together immediately. We haven’t talked about it.”

The mug of tea had gone cold in his hands (and really the odds of him drinking it hadn’t been great to start with). Hardy set the cup down and turned the computer so it was facing toward the invitingly dimpled throw pillows at the end of the couch. He must have known he’d end up laying there with how perfectly framed his face was in the little box on the screen. There was a stretched old blanket that was just warm enough pulled up over his shoulders. 

“Of course your children would be welcome,” Hardy said. “They’re your children.”

Bill blushed, but only in the very finest pinks, trying not to look too embarrassed that it hadn’t even _occurred _to him that it might not be a problem. As far as he’d seen it was a common point of contention; so common that it showed up in all kinds of stories. Hardy just didn’t have the energy to be any sort of terrible step-parent. He didn’t possess the temperament or the cruelty to be mean to a child. 

(And in fact, he was _more_ pleased than upset to hear that Bill found the confidence to speak to his own children and that it had gone so well for him. It spared Hardy the effort it would have taken to lecture him on the matter.)

“I’m keeping you up,” Bill said.

“I want to be kept up by you.”

Bill’s blush went straight to his eyes, filled up his face with twinkles. He cleared his throat as he dipped forward to set the wine glass down and retrieved his delightful reading glasses. “Well, in that case, why don’t I read to you? We might find that we’ll both get what we want.”

Hardy snorted at that. It would have taken more effort to be irritated by how Bill made it sound like they were both going to get what they wanted. Hardy didn’t want to be read to sleep; he didn’t want to be so _tired_ just from doing nothing all day. He wanted Bill to be closer, maybe sitting on this couch with him. It wouldn’t be so bad to be lulled to sleep if there were fingers maybe brushing through his hair.

“Remind me, have you gotten your tickets yet?”

“I’ll get them tomorrow,” Bill promised. “Should we start at the first chapter?”

“Not on my account,” Hardy said.

But Bill flipped the book back to the start regardless. 


End file.
